As the Army transforms into a more lethal, lighter and agile force, the technologies that support these systems must decrease in size while increasing in intelligence. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are one such technology that the Army and DOD will rely on heavily to achieve these objectives. The MEMS devices within these systems will be required to last as long as the lifetime of the w...

This study explored the use patterns and benefits of directional microphone technology in real-world situations experienced by patients who had been fitted with switchable omnidirectional/directional hearing aids. Telephone interviews and paper-and-pencil questionnaires were used to assess perceived performance with each microphone type in a variety of listening situations. Patients who used th...

There has been a strong interest in theory and design of spherical microphone arrays in recent years due to their possible use in recording directional sounds for surround sound creation. The theory of such arrays is based on decomposition of sound fields to spherical harmonics which are the natural basis functions for valid sound fields over three dimensional space. However, due to physical si...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS A piezoelectric sensor, floating piezoelectric microphone, driven by acoustic vibration of the ossicles, is one possible design for a microphone for a totally implantable cochlear implant. The purpose of the article was to study the frequency response of the floating piezoelectric microphone and to identify the ideal feasible position in the ossicular chain. STUDY DESIGN...

Sound pressure measurements were made at the hearing aid microphones of 20 subjects with their in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aids and a behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aid to determine the influence of microphone location on hearing aid input. A probe tube microphone was used to measure the difference in dB SPL between the ITE and BTE microphone locations. ITE microphone location resulted in a maximum ...

This research was carried out on enhancing throat microphone speech for noise-robust speech keyword spotting. The enhancement was performed by mapping the log-energy in the Mel-frequency bands of throat microphone speech to those of the corresponding close-talk microphone speech. An analytic equation detection system, Eureqa, which can infer nonlinear relations directly from observed data, was ...

In recent years, a very large amount of scientific work has been achieved around Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Some industrial success stories (accelerometers, gyroscopes and MOEMS) have shown their maturity. MEMS are now starting to take place around us in our everyday life as the microelectronic did 20 years ago. However, a lot of effort is still needed for the integration of ICs a...

In this review paper, several strategies for the implementation of reconfigurable split ring resonators (SRRs) based on RF-MEMS switches are presented. Essentially three types of RF-MEMS combined with split rings are considered: (i) bridge-type RF-MEMS on top of complementary split ring resonators CSRRs; (ii) cantilever-type RF-MEMS on top of SRRs; and (iii) cantilever-type RF-MEMS integrated w...

MEMS resonators have started replacing the quartz crystals and SAW resonators in RF transceivers because of their inherent advantages like high quality factor, small size, robustness and easy integrability with supporting electronics. The paper presents the developments that have taken place in MEMS resonators. Some of the issues in the design and development of electrostatically transduced MEM...

Integrated circuit packaging and their testing is well advanced because of the maturity of the IC industry, their wide applications, and availability of industrial inhstructure. [ 1,2] This is not true for MEMS with respect to packaging and testing. It is more difficult to adopt standardized MEMS device packaging for wide applications although MEMS use many similar technologies to IC packaging....