• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• 제23권4호
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• pp.197-203
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: Many studies have reported no benefit of sound localization, but improved speech understanding in noise after treating patients with single-sided deafness (SSD). Furthermore, their performances provided a large individual difference. The present study aimed to measure the ability of speech perception and gap detection in noise for the SSD patients to better understand their hearing nature. Subjects and Methods: Nine SSD patients with different onset and period of hearing deprivation and 20 young adults with normal hearing and simulated conductive hearing loss as the control groups conducted speech perception in noise (SPIN) and Gap-In-Noise (GIN) tests. The SPIN test asked how many presented sentences were understood at the +5 and -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio. The GIN test was asked to find the shortest gap in white noise with different lengths in the gap. Results: Compared to the groups with normal hearing and simulated instant hearing loss, the SSD group showed much poor performance in both SPIN and GIN tests while supporting central auditory plasticity of the SSD patients. Rather than a longer period of deafness, the large individual variance indicated that the congenital SSD patients showed better performance than the acquired SSD patients in two measurements. Conclusions: The results suggested that comprehensive assessments should be implemented before any treatment of the SSD patient considering their onset time and etiology, although these findings need to be generalized with a large sample size.

• 대한청각학회지
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• 제23권4호
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• pp.197-203
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: Many studies have reported no benefit of sound localization, but improved speech understanding in noise after treating patients with single-sided deafness (SSD). Furthermore, their performances provided a large individual difference. The present study aimed to measure the ability of speech perception and gap detection in noise for the SSD patients to better understand their hearing nature. Subjects and Methods: Nine SSD patients with different onset and period of hearing deprivation and 20 young adults with normal hearing and simulated conductive hearing loss as the control groups conducted speech perception in noise (SPIN) and Gap-In-Noise (GIN) tests. The SPIN test asked how many presented sentences were understood at the +5 and -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio. The GIN test was asked to find the shortest gap in white noise with different lengths in the gap. Results: Compared to the groups with normal hearing and simulated instant hearing loss, the SSD group showed much poor performance in both SPIN and GIN tests while supporting central auditory plasticity of the SSD patients. Rather than a longer period of deafness, the large individual variance indicated that the congenital SSD patients showed better performance than the acquired SSD patients in two measurements. Conclusions: The results suggested that comprehensive assessments should be implemented before any treatment of the SSD patient considering their onset time and etiology, although these findings need to be generalized with a large sample size.

• 성인간호학회지
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.209-222
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• 2001

The environment in the ICU leads to negative changes in a patient's usual sleep pattern and so contributes negatively to the patient's health condition as compared to patients in general wards. Therefore, it is thought that an important nursing intervention would be to identify the relation between noise and sleep patterns which play an important role in illness recovery. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationship between noise in the ICU and the sleep pattern of patients admitted to the ICU. A descriptive correlation design was used to examine the relationship. Thirty-four subjects were recruited from a Medical ICU (MICU), Surgical ICU (SICU) and Coronary Care Unit (CCU) at a large university hospital in Suwon. Data were collected from September 28 to October 31 in 1999. In the present study, noise was categorized into noise level and patients' perception of noise. The objective noise level was measured using the A-Weighted Sound Level Meter. The patients' preception of noise was measured using a self-reported questionnaire developed by the researcher. Sleep patterns in this study includes both quantity and quality of sleep. These were measured using open ended questionnaires and the 'Korean Sleep Scale A' developed by Oh, Song, Kim(1998). The data was analyzed using the SPSS-WIN to test the research question, Pearson product moment correlation coefficient was run. Ancillary analysis were conducted with demographic variables to determine their relation to the main study variables. For the ancillary analysis, t-test and one-way ANOVAs were performed. The results of the present study are summerized as follows : 1. The total mean of objective noise level (10pm-6am) was 56.2dB. The means for night time noise level in individual ICUs for the SICU, MICU and CCU, were 58.7dB, 58.6dB and 48.3dB, respectively. The total mean for patients' noise perception was 42.8 out of a maximum possible score of 76. For item means of noise perception, the one ranked highest was "conversations between doctors and nurses" (3.2). The one ranked lowest was "noise from the radio" (1.2). Regarding the degree of perception for each type of noise source, the one ranked highest was "equipment noise" (2.6), the second was "conversation between medical staff" (2.4), the third was "conversation between patients, caregivers and visitors" (2.3), and the one ranked lowest was "environment noise" (1.8). 2. Looking at quantity of sleep of ICU patients, the mean nocturnal sleep time was found to be 4.9 hours. The total mean of sleep quality for ICU patients was 21.0 out of a maximum possible score of 40. 3. The relationship between perception of noise and quantity of sleep was statistically significant(r= - .41, p<.05). The relationship between perception of noise and quality of sleep was also statistically significant(r= - .47, p<.01). The results of the study indicate that personal perception of noise is related to sleep patterns. Therefore, it is suggested that nursing interventions be developed to reduce the degree of personal perception of noise and, thus, decrease sleep pattern disturbances in patients in the ICU.

• 한국소음진동공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국소음진동공학회 2007년도 추계학술대회논문집
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• pp.311-317
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• 2007

The reduction of the Vehicle interior noise has been the main interest of NVH engineers. The driver's perception on the vehicle noise is affected largely by psychoacoustic characteristic of the noise as well as the SPL. The previous methods to evaluation of the SQ about vehicle interior noise are linear regression analysis of subjective SQ metrics by statistics and the estimation of the subjective SQ values by neural network. But these are so depended on jury test very much that they result in many difficulties. So, to reduce jury test weight, we suggested a new method using Mahalanobis distance for SQ evaluation. And, optimal characteristic values influenced on the result of the SQ evaluation were derived by signal to noise ratio(SN ratio) of the Taguchi method. Finally, the new method to evaluate SQ is constructed using Mahalanobis-Taguchi system(MTS). Furthermore, the MTS method for SQ evaluation was compared by the result of SQ grade table at the previous study and their virtues and faults introduced.

• 한국소음진동공학회논문집
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• 제18권4호
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• pp.393-399
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• 2008

The reduction of the Vehicle interior noise has been the main interest of NVH engineers. The driver's perception on the vehicle noise is affected largely by psychoacoustic characteristic of the noise as well as the SPL. The previous methods to evaluation of the SQ about vehicle interior noise are linear regression analysis of subjective SQ metrics by statistics and the estimation of the subjective SQ values by neural network. But these are so depended on jury test very much that they result in many difficulties. So, to reduce jury test weight, we suggested a new method using Mahalanobis distance for SQ evaluation. And, optimal characteristic values influenced on the result of the SQ evaluation were derived by signal to noise ratio(SN ratio) of the Taguchi method. Finally, the new method to evaluate SQ is constructed using Mahalanobis-Taguchi system(MTS). Furthermore, the MTS method for SQ evaluation was compared by the result of SQ grade table at the previous study and their virtues and faults introduced.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• 제13권6호
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• pp.461-467
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• 2009

The auditory cortex (A1) encodes the acquired significance of sound for the perception and interpretation of sound. Nitric oxide (NO) is a gas molecule with free radical properties that functions as a transmitter molecule and can alter neural activity without direct synaptic connections. We used whole-cell recordings under voltage clamp to investigate the effect of NO on spontaneous GABAergic synaptic transmission in mechanically isolated rat auditory cortical neurons preserving functional presynaptic nerve terminals. GABAergic spontaneous inhibitory postsynaptic currents (sIPSCs) in the A1 were completely blocked by bicuculline. The NO donor, S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine (SNAP), reduced the GABAergic sIPSC frequency without affecting the mean current amplitude. The SNAP-induced inhibition of sIPSC frequency was mimicked by 8-bromoguanosine cyclic 3',5'-monophosphate, a membrane permeable cyclic-GMP analogue, and blocked by 2-(4-carboxyphenyl)-4,4,5,5-tetramethylimidazoline-1-oxyl-3-oxide, a specific NO scavenger. Blockade of presynaptic $K^+$ channels by 4-aminopyridine, a $K^+$ channel blocker, increased the frequencies of GABAergic sIPSCs, but did not affect the inhibitory effects of SNAP. However, blocking of presynaptic $Ca^{2+}$ channels by $Cd^{2+}$, a general voltage-dependent $Ca^{2+}$ channel blocker, decreased the frequencies of GABAergic sIPSCs, and blocked SNAP-induced reduction of sIPSC frequency. These findings suggest that NO inhibits spontaneous GABA release by activation of cGMP-dependent signaling and inhibition of presynaptic $Ca^{2+}$ channels in the presynaptic nerve terminals of A1 neurons.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.39-51
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• 2008

Formant measurements are one of the most important factors to objectively test cross-linguistic differences among vowels produced by speakers of any given languages. However, many speech analysis softwares present erroneous estimates and some researchers use them without any verification procedures. The purposes of this paper are to examine formant measurements of complex waves which were synthesized from the average formant values of five Korean vowels using three default methods in Praat and to verify the measured values of the five vowels produced by 20 students using one of the methods. Variances along the time axis are discussed after determining absolute difference sum from the 1/3 vowel duration point. Results show that there were smaller measurement errors by the burg method. Also, greater errors were observed in the sl or lpc methods mostly caused by the inappropriate formant settings. Formant measurement deviations were greater in those vowels produced by the female students than those of the male students, which were mostly attributed to the settings for the vowels /o, u/. Formant settings can best be corrected by changing the number of formants to the number of visible dark bands on the spectrogram. Those results suggest that researchers should check the validity of the estimates from the speech analysis software. Further studies are recommended on the perception test of the original sound with the synthesized sound by the estimated formant values.

• 대한의용생체공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한의용생체공학회 1997년도 추계학술대회
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• pp.67-70
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• 1997

In this paper, we evaluated the character of speech of hearing impaired person (HIP) who acquire his hearing loss after the youth. It is usually observed that severe HIP decreased not only speech perception but also vocalization. so there is a need for sensitive and quantitative measures or the assesment of the speech of the HIP to serve both diagnostic and prognosic purposes, 7 HIP and 12 normal hearing person(NHP) were studied with pure tone test and speaking test using word/sentence table which consists of vowel(a:), mono and two syllables and a sentence. we analyzed formant frequency, pitch, sound intensity, speech duration of HIP and NHP speech. According to the results, in the HIP's speech we find that formant frequency was shifted, first-formant prominence was reduced, the dynamic range of sound intensity was decreased, speech duration was prolonged. In the next, we expect the correlation between hearing and speech character of HIP is cleared through analysis of more acoustic parameters and precise selection of HIP group.

• 한국정밀공학회지
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• 제26권12호
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• pp.131-137
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• 2009

Recent technological advances made a vehicle more intelligent to increase safety and comfort. An intelligent vehicle provides drivers with safety warning information through audible sounds, visual displays, and tactile devices. However, elderly drivers have been known to decrease the physical and cognitive abilities such as muscular strength, hearing, eyesight, short term memory, and spatial perception. Therefore, possible age-related deficits should be considered to design an effective warning system. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of advancing age on response performance on audible safety warnings which are widely used for alerting driving hazards. In order to understand the effect of age-related hearing loss and movement slowing, three sound characteristics (frequency, intensity, and period) and three age groups (younger, middle, and older) are considered. Data was drawn from 38 drivers who drove a simulated rural road in a driving simulator. Experimental results show that age influences driver's response performance. In conclusion, the appropriate range of a warning sound is suggested.

• 제어로봇시스템학회논문지
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• 제16권2호
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• pp.202-205
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• 2010

When we render 3D sound images using headphones or speakers, the main key of this technology is the Head-related transfer function (HRTF) database. Even though there are various HRTF databases, they have some drawbacks such as detrimental effects caused by imperfect measuring environment and insufficient measurement points. Moreover there is no database with Korean subjects. We are planning to develop the HRTF database for Korean. As a first step to establish the HRTF database aimed at Korean, the new HRTF measurement system with minimized aforementioned drawbacks is designed. In this paper, the newly designed HRTF measurement system is introduced and the overall effects caused by the diffraction of the apparatus, especially the headrest and backrest of the chair, are analyzed. The backrest of the chair does not distort the HRTFs significantly while the headrest makes significant distortion on the HRTFs and it could have significant effects on directional perception. We determined acceptable head rotation angle and head position of the subject for accurate HRTF measurement based on the experiments with B&K HATS. We conclude that the 3 degrees of the head rotation and the 1.5cm front/back/left/right shift of the head do not distort the HRTFs significantly.