An electronic device for hearing-handicapped drivers: evaluation of performance.
There are several countries in the world in which people with severe hearing loss are not eligible for a car driver's license. As a technical approach to solve this problem, an electronic device is developed which detects traffic-alarm-sounds, i.e. horns of cars, sirens of emergency vehicles and alarm signals of railroad crossings, and then displays them as vibration to the driver. The basic operating principle of the device is that those traffic-alarm-sounds have marked regularity in some particular frequency region whereas the traffic noise is a wide-band random noise. The real time detection of the regularity is realized by use of a phase-locked-loop and a simplified lock-in amplifier. The results of simulation experiments and road tests demonstrate that the performance of the device is satisfactory except in the case of the detection of the alarm signals of railroad crossings.
Miyazaki
S
S
Institute for Medical and Dental Engineering, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Japan.
Ishida
A
A
D001334:Automobile Driving; D003638:Deafness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D004867:Equipment Design; D004864:Equipment and Supplies; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009624:Noise, Transportation; D014732:Vibration