Yuka Maeda

Estimation of contact force and amount of hair between skin and bone-conducted sound transducer using electrical impedance

Noninvasive bone-conducted hearing aids require the consistent fitting of transducers for consistent hearing. In this paper, a method of estimating the contact force and amount of hair between a persons skin and a bone-conducted sound transducer using electrical impedance is proposed. Experiments are conducted with a human surface model consisting of hair, skin, and bone. The estimator is implemented with a three-layered neural network. Ten measurements for 70 conditions are conducted by changing the contact force from 0 to 5 N and the amount of hair from 0 to 169.6 mm3. With the trained estimator, it is possible to estimate contact force and the intermediate material thickness with mean errors of 0.025 N and 0.424 mm3. This result supports the feasibility of the proposed method and contributes to the reproducible placement of the bone-conducted sound transducer.

Effect of characteristics compensation between air-conduction and bone-conduction headphones on sound localization in an anechoic chamber

Bone-conduction (BC) headphones are used when users need to hear provided sounds as well as environmental sounds since they do not occlude the environmental sounds. Sound localization characteristics of the BC sounds are usually worse than that of the air-conduction (AC) sounds. If the frequency characteristics of AC sounds can be reproduced with BC headphones, better sound localization with BC headphones can be achieved. To compensate the frequency characteristics difference between these sounds, a method to measure the frequency characteristics difference is proposed. Also, compensated BC sound is examined by localizing sounds. At first, the difference between AC and BC sounds are measured by tuning their amplitudes and phases to cancel at perceiving sound. The measurements were conducted for 30 frequencies in the audible range. Second, localization characteristics are measured in an anechoic chamber. The sounds are presented from AC and BC headphones using the corresponding head related transfer functi...

The Role of Wearable Monitor for Healthcare

Wearable monitor for healthcare was proposed in the late 1990s. Physiological monitoring in daily life has considerable potential for preventing and predicting diseases, without significant discomfort or inconvenience to the user. Over the past 25 years, wearable monitoring systems have been developed for health monitoring in daily life. In this presentation we will 1) review the devices used in wearable monitoring, including home use and clinical practice; 2) consider the evidence for their benefit in terms of healthcare outcomes; and 3) discuss long-term data collection and analysis using Big Data techniques. Furthermore, issues relating to the popularization of these devices are discussed, including regulation and business models. There are many promising devices available for wearable healthcare monitoring, and we propose ideas to popularize these devices.