Electrical stimulation at the wrist as an aid for the profoundly deaf.
The development and evaluation of a sensory electrical substitution aid for the profoundly deaf is described. The aid is a small wrist-worn device which converts sound into an electrical stimulus at the wrist. The initial aim was to give profoundly deaf people useful information from ambient sounds. Evaluation of the Mark 1 aid on 15 hearing and five profoundly deaf people indicated that such a device might be of use to some deaf people. Investigation of the sensitivity of the peripheral nervous system to electrical pulse stimulation showed that information could be transmitted in a more efficient manner so a Mark 2 aid was developed which incorporated circuitry to transmit pitch information, potentially useful in lipreading. The Mark 2 aid was shown to give improved results over the Mark 1 aid in transmitting voice intonation, but gave no help in an isolated word lipreading test. A portable Mark 2 aid was developed to enable clinical trials to be carried out on profoundly deaf people.
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001698:Biomedical Engineering / Q000295:instrumentation; D003143:Communication Devices for People with Disabilities; D003638:Deafness; D004558:Electric Stimulation / Q000295:instrumentation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010898:Pitch Perception; D012656:Self-Help Devices; D013016:Sound; D014953:Wrist / Q000294:innervation