Use of supplemental/Substitutive Aids for Hearing-Impaired

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Artificial hearing, such as electrical stimulation of auditory nerves and mechanical stimulation through the tactile sensation on skin surface, introduced a possibility of utilizing speech sound to profoundly hearing -impaired people. While the numbers of users increasing rapidly in the world for more than twenty years, further improvement on functional aspects of their devices had not made progress than expected.For the research on this improvement, however, it is necessary to gather the data of detailed evaluation experiments on speech perception ability through the proposed artificial hearing devices. As such experiments require comprehensive observation of informative users of the devices over a long period, the reliable data can be obtained only in the capable research organizations. Above all, such rare experiments are being done with speech in different language of the subjects, so that the results can not be compared directly among each other.In order to overcome this serious problem, researchers in Sweden, Austria, United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Japan, who have been most active in research and development of the artificial hearing in the world, have joined in a research group in this program, and possibility of standardizing evaluation method internationally has been investigated through the exchange visits between counterpart countries and Japan during these two years period.As the results, a new strategy of converting the results of evaluation experiments in different language mutually has been derived, based on the detailed analysis of characteristics of speech processing mechanism in the artificial hearing devices, and it has been shown to be possible to settle common evaluation criteria for speech perception ability through the artificial hearing.