This paper discusses the design, development, features, and clinical evaluation of a personal digital assistant (PDA)-based platform for cochlear implant research. This highly versatile and portable research platform allows researchers to design and perform complex experiments with cochlear implants manufactured by Cochlear Corporation with great ease and flexibility. The research platform includes a portable processor for implementing and evaluating novel speech processing algorithms, a stimulator unit which can be used for electrical stimulation and neurophysio-logic studies with animals, and a recording unit for collecting electroencephalogram/evoked potentials from human subjects. The design of the platform for real time and offline stimulation modes is discussed for electric-only and electric plus acoustic stimulation followed by results from an acute study with implant users for speech intelligibility in quiet and noisy conditions. The results are comparable with users’ clinical processor and very promising for undertaking chronic studies.
Hearing loss is an increasingly prevalent condition resulting from damage to the inner ear which causes a reduction in speech intelligibility. The societal need for assistive hearing devices has increased exponentially over the past two decades; however, actual human performance with such devices has only seen modest gains relative to advancements in digital signal processing (DSP) technology. A major challenge with clinical hearing technologies is the limited ability to run complex signal processing algorithms requiring high computation power. The CCi-MOBILE platform, developed at UT-Dallas, provides the research community with an open-source, flexible, easy-to-use, software-mediated, powerful computing research interface to conduct a wide variety of listening experiments. The platform supports cochlear implants (CIs) and hearing aids (HAs) independently, as well as bimodal hearing (i.e., a CI in one ear and HA in the contralateral ear). The platform is ideally suited to address hearing research for: both quiet and naturalistic noisy conditions, sound localization, and lateralization. The platform uses commercially available smartphone/tablet devices as portable sound processors and can provide bilateral electric and acoustic stimulation. The hardware components, firmware, and software suite are presented to demonstrate safety to the speech scientist and CI/HA user, highlight user-specificity, and outline various applications of the platform for research.
Design of an optimized RF transcutaneous link through inductive coils is an arduous design process which involves complex mathematical modeling to search for optimized design parameters. This paper presents a generalized model which encompasses all possible voltage driven circuit realizations of an inductive link and presents a comparison on the bases of link efficiency and voltage gain. Mathematical expressions for the generalized voltage driven model as well as for the equivalent circuit topologies are derived. Moreover effect of different parameters such as resonating impedances on the final relationships is exhaustively analyzed.Optimization is a critical aspect in designing inductive links for medical implants since the link virtually acts as an aircore transformer with relatively low mutual coupling. Therefore, in order to maximize the gain and improve the link efficiency it is very necessary to design the link on optimized parameters. Aim of the analysis is to facilitate the designers in their design process as mathematical relationships for different models and their comparison has never been reported earlier in literature.
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