• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.141-147
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• 2018

Purpose : Aim of the this study was conducted to determine whether hearing aids are responsible for the quality of life by comparing quality of life between the elderly who are suspected of difficulty in hearing selected by Hearing Handicap Inventory of Elderly (HHIE) without using hearing aids and who are using hearing aids. Methods : For the study, two groups of 33 people were analyzed for independent t-test based on whether they wore Hearing Aids (HA) or not whom wearing hearing aids (hearing aids users) and suspected difficulty in hearing. who are attending the Religious organization Senior Welfare Center in the OO region. Result : The quality of life of hearing aid users is generally observed to be higher than that of non-users in general, and by the section, psychological (p=0.019) and living environment (p=0.032) were appeared statistically signigicant. The elderly showed a significant difference. In the section, "Operation Satisfaction (p=0.038)" in the physical health area, "relationship of reason (p=0.018)" in the social relationship area, "Economic margin (p=0.021)" in the environmental area, "Information accessibility (p=0.020)", In the psychological area, hearing aid was used for "self satisfaction (p=0.033)", "concentration of work (p=0.045)". Conclusion : The use of hearing aids by hearing loss elderly improves the quality of life in the psychological health and living environment section.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.37-43
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• 2009

In this study, multi-channel digital hearing aid algorithm for low power system is proposed. First, MDCT(Modified Discrete Cosine Transform) method converts time domain of input speech signal into frequency domain of it. Output signal from MDCT makes a group about each channel, and then each channel signal adjusts a gain using LCF(Loudness Compensation Function) table depending on hearing loss of an auditory person. Finally, compensation signal is composed by TDAC and IMDCT. Its all of process make progress 16-bit fixed-point operation. We use fast-MDCT instead of MDCT for reducing system complexity and previously computed tables instead of log computation for estimating a gain. This algorithm evaluate through computer simulation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.623-629
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• 1998

To provide sufficient sound to the hearing-impaired person(HIP) who have many difficulty in communication with others using general telephone, big amplification is needed. But big amplification can occur howling as a side effect. In this study we developed the new technique of big amplification without howling, manufactured and estimated the new hearing aid telephone. Telephone speech is divided to three frequency band, amplified respectively and fitted to HIP's hearing ability. The telephone speech frequency is monitored by counter in time domain. The counter transfers the sinusoidal sound to rectangular wave using comparator and counts the number of rectangular wave in a certain time period, that is frequency, to monitor the howling. Telephone have microphone and speaker, which are fitted in a rigid structure and frequency band of telephone sound is limited, so howling occurs in the limited frequency band. If the counter notices that howling conditions happen, microprocessor decreases quickly the gain of the related frequency band. The result of test of our new hearing aid telephone showed that we can amplifiy the sound as much as 40dB, which is meaningful level to many HIP, and make HIP increase their perception ability from 20% to 60.8% in 1 syllable test and from 28.9% to 78% in 2 syllable test.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.274-277
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is 1) to describe the phoneme inventories of cochlear implant(CI) children and 2) to describe their utterances using narrow phonetic transcription method. All the subjects had more than 2 year-experience with CI and showed more than 87% open-set sentence perception abilities. Average consonant accuracy was 81.36% and it was improved up to 87.41% when distortion errors were not counted. They showed different error patterns from hearing aid users. The prominent error pattern was weakening of consonants.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.69-85
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• 2000

Recently, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) received widely held attention from diverse audiences. However, to the author's knowledge, relatively little attention was paid to the educational implications of voice recognition (VR) softwares in language teaching in general, and teaching and learning pronunciation in particular. This study explores, and extends the applicability of VR softwares toward second language research areas addressing how VR softwares might facilitate interview data entering processes. To aid the readers' understanding in this field, the background of classroom interaction research, and the rationale of why interview data, therefore the role of VR softwares, becomes critical in this realm of inquiry will be discussed. VR softwares' development and a brief report on the features of up-to-date VR softwares will be sketched. Finally, suggestions for future studies investigating the impact of VR softwares on second language learning, teaching, and research will be offered.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.57-75
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• 1999

The purpose of this paper is to develop an English prosody training system using PC for Korean learners of English. The program is called Intonation Training Tool (ITT). It operates on DOS 5.0. The hardware for this program requires over IBM PC 386 with 4 MBytes main memory, SVGA (1 MByte or more) for graphic, soundblaster 16 and over 14 inch monitor size. The ITT program operates this way: the learners can listen as well as see the English teacher's stress and intonation patterns on the monitor. The learner practices the same patterns with a microphone. This program facilitates the learner's stress and intonation patterns to overlap the teacher's patterns. The learner can find his/her stress and intonation errors and correct these independently. This program is expected to be a highly efficient learning tool for Korean learners of English in their English prosody training in the English class without the aid of a native English speaker in the classroom.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.197-202
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• 2005

The cochlear implantation(CI) as an useful tool for aural rehabilitation in bilateral severe to profound hearing impairment. However, CI prefer to usually one ear in spite of bilateral hearing impaired. because of the various characteristics of hearing loss, the hearing conservation for the future possibility, and socioeconomic condition of hearing impaired person and their families. The unilateral CI has limitations such as a directional loss, a difficult speech understanding in noise and a neural plasticity. These limitations will be overcome by hearing aid(HA) which is familiar with hearing impairer. but HA fitting for bimodal-binaural hearing are difficult because the difference output characteristic of HA and CI. This study will be confirm realities of use of HA in unilateral cochlear implantee. For this goal, 25(m:f=10:15) child participated who are used to HA for 1 to 17 months. We had telephone interviews with their mother about use of HA, change of auditory performance and own voice. As the results, hearing threshold levels of unimplanted ear, the use of a appropriate HA, implanted and aided hearing threshold level(HTL) are must be considered for successful biomodal-binaural hearing. Especially, implanted and aided HTL should be very useful parameter for a prediction of HA effect and a criterion of selection for bilateral cochlear implantation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.55-63
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• 2020

Voice conversion can be applied to various voice processing applications. It can also play an important role in data augmentation for speech recognition. The conventional method uses the architecture of voice conversion with speech synthesis, with Mel filter bank as the main parameter. Mel filter bank is well-suited for quick computation of neural networks but cannot be converted into a high-quality waveform without the aid of a vocoder. Further, it is not effective in terms of obtaining data for speech recognition. In this paper, we focus on performing voice-to-voice conversion using only the raw spectrum. We propose a deep learning model based on the transformer network, which quickly learns the voice conversion properties using an attention mechanism between source and target spectral components. The experiments were performed on TIDIGITS data, a series of numbers spoken by an English speaker. The conversion voices were evaluated for naturalness and similarity using mean opinion score (MOS) obtained from 30 participants. Our final results yielded 3.52±0.22 for naturalness and 3.89±0.19 for similarity.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.76-86
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• 2022

Personal hearing devices, such as hearing aids, may be fine-tuned by allowing the users to conduct self-adjustment. Two self-adjustment procedures were developed to collect the listener preferred gains in six octave-frequency bands from 0.25 kHz to 8 kHz. These procedures were designed to allow rapid exploration of a multi-dimensional parameter space using a simple, one-dimensional user control interface (i.e., a programmable knob). The two procedures differ in whether the user interface controls the gains in all frequency bands simultaneously (Procedure A) or only the gain in one frequency band (Procedure B) on a given trial. Monte-Carlo simulations suggested that for both procedures the gain preference identified by simulated listeners rapidly converged to the ground-truth preferred gain profile over the first 20 trials. Initial behavioral evaluations of the self-adjustment procedures, in terms of test-retest reliability, were conducted using 20 young, normal-hearing listeners. Each estimate of the preferred gain profile took less than 20 minutes. The deviation between two separate estimates of the preferred gain profile, conducted at least a week apart, was about 10 dB ~ 15 dB.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.102-110
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• 2017

In this paper, we have implemented an real-time adaptive feedback cancellation(AFC) algorithm that can be applied to multi-channel digital hearing aid. Multichannel digital hearing aid typically use the FFT filterbank based Wide Dynamic Range Compression(WDRC) algorithm to compensate for hearing loss. The implemented real-time acoustic feedback cancellation algorithm has one integrated structure using the same FFT filter bank with WDRC, which can be beneficial in terms of computation affecting the hearing aid battery life. In addition, when the AFC fails to operate due to nonlinear input and output, the reduction gain is applied to improve robustness in practical environment. The implemented algorithm can be further improved by adding various signal processing algorithm such as speech enhancement.