OBJECTIVE The objectives of the investigation were to evaluate the effect of a sound processor upgrade on the speech reception threshold in noise and to collect long-term safety and efficacy data after 2½ to 5 years of device use of direct acoustic cochlear implant (DACI) recipients. STUDY DESIGN The study was designed as a mono-centric, prospective clinical trial. SETTING Tertiary referral...

This article introduces and provides an assessment of a spatial-filtering algorithm based on two closely-spaced (∼1 cm) microphones in a behind-the-ear shell. The evaluated spatial-filtering algorithm used fast (∼10 ms) temporal-spectral analysis to determine the location of incoming sounds and to enhance sounds arriving from straight ahead of the listener. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) we...

Background: Previous studies showed that one of the complications of rheumatoid arthritis disease was auditory disorder. The goal of the present study was to compare the auditory status in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and healthy individuals. Methods: In the present case-control study, 30 normal persons and 60 persons with rheumatoid arthritis with mean age of 46.72 and standard deviatio...

The Modified Bark Spectral Distortion (MBSD), used for an objective speech quality measure, was presented previously [1]. The MBSD measure takes into account the noise masking threshold in order to use only audible distortions in the calculation of the distortion measure. Preliminary simulation results have shown improvement of the MBSD over the conventional BSD. In this paper, performance of t...

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement method by exploiting masking properties of human auditory system. The masking properties are exploited to calculate a masking threshold. The spectral components which lie above the threshold are audible to human listeners. These audible spectral components in the proposed method are suppressed as a predefined attenuation factor of the original nois...

Continuous speech shows pronounced low-frequency modulations in its temporal envelope. Modulation frequencies near the average syllabic rate of 3-4 Hz are the most prominent. Degradations in these low-frequency modulations reduce speech intelligibility (Drullman et al., 1994; Drullman et al., 1994; Houtgast and Steeneken, 1973), while speech processed to have minimal spectral information is int...

The paper presents a novel technique for underwater acoustic voice communications. The speech signal is compressed prior to transmission by using Linear Predictive Coding and transmission of appropriate speech parameters is achieved by Digital Pulse Position Modulation. The main emphasis here is on the reception of the multipath-dominant signal and on the demodulation process.

This paper presents the virtual speech cuer built in the context of the ARTUS project aiming at watermarking hand and face gestures of a virtual animated agent in a broadcasted audiovisual sequence. For deaf televiewers that master cued speech, the animated agent can be then superimposed on demand and at the reception on the original broadcast as an alternative to subtitling. The paper presents...

This paper presents the virtual speech cuer built in the context of the ARTUS project aiming at watermarking hand and face gestures of a virtual animated agent in a broadcasted audiovisual sequence. For deaf televiewers that master cued speech, the animated agent can be then incrusted on demand and at the reception in the original broadcast as an alternative to subtitling. The paper presents th...

For several years, we have been working on means to improve speech reception for severely sensory hearing-impaired persons. The work done includes algorithms for non-linear speech processing as well as phoneme spotting and transposition. The overall goal is to implement some of these algorithms into low-power DSPs in a wearable device. Here we will present the current state of our research, and...