Dental Hearing Aid

Dental Hearing Aid Technology from Sonitus Medical

SoundBite hearing system is intended for patients who suffer from single sided deafness, conductive hearing loss, or mixed hearing loss and seek a non-surgical, non-invasive, hearing device that delivers high fidelity sound.

Sonitus Medical out of San Mateo, California is a company that's betting on bone conducting dental hearing implant technology. The SoundBite Hearing System that the firm is developing consists of a unit that has a microphone and wireless transmitter, and a tiny speaker that attaches to rear teeth to resonate and transmit the audio mechanically to the cochleae. The idea for this technology is not new and maybe risky, but Sonitus Medical seems confident it can earn regulatory approval and introduce an all new hearing aid technology to market.

The SoundBite hearing system consists of both a BTE (behind the ear) microphone unit, housing the receiver, wireless transmitter, and attached microphone, and a discreet, removable ITM (in the mouth) hearing device. An inductive charger unit is provided to charge the BTE microphone unit and ITM hearing device.

SoundBite is designed to detect sound using a tiny microphone placed in an open-fit dome within the ear canal of the impaired ear. This nearly invisible microphone is attached by a thin tube to a transmitter unit called a BTE worn behind the ear. Placing the microphone in the ear canal is intended to allow the SoundBite hearing system to capitalize on the natural acoustic benefit provided by the patient's own pinna or outer ear to capture and direct sound.

Read full article at: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2010/02/dental_hearing_aid_technology_from_sonitus_medical.html

Fold your cardboard speakers

The Foldable Speaker
Taking an entertainment center on the road can be a pain, as even the smallest portable speakers weigh a pound or two and take up valuable space. Chicago-based OrigAudio has come up with an ingenious solution: self-powered, 1-watt speakers made of heavy-duty recycled paper. Assembly is easy: simply fold the paper into a 3-in. (7.6 cm) cube. For travel, unfold it and slip the flat sheet into your laptop sleeve. Sold through the company's website, Origaudio.com, and at select retailers, the speakers ($16 a pair) can be hooked up to any audio device with a headphone jack. Part of the proceeds supports the nonprofit Music National Service, which brings music to public schools and low-income communities. Origami has never sounded so good.

Check out the speakers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQdLV6EB5RY&feature=player_embedded
Read more: http://asia.cnet.com/crave/2009/10/16/foldable-cardboard-speakers-from-origaudio/

Small sounds replicated virtually

Researchers bring noise to virtual worlds
Cornell computer scientists have developed a practical method to generate the crashing and rumbling sounds of objects made up of thin "harmonic shells," including the sounds of cymbals, falling garbage cans and lids, and plastic water-cooler bottles and recycling bins.

The work by graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An and Doug James, associate professor of computer science, will be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Yokohama, Japan, in December.

As virtual environments become more realistic and immersive, the researchers point out, computers will have to generate sounds that match the behavior of objects in real time. Even in an animated movie, where sound effects can be dubbed in after the fact from recordings of real sounds, synthesized sounds can match more realistically to the action. So the goal is to start with the computer model of an object already created by animators, analyze how such an object would vibrate when dropped or struck, and how that vibration would be transferred to the air to radiate as sound.

When a thin-shelled object is struck or falls, the metal or plastic sheet slightly deforms and snaps back, triggering a vibration. To simulate the deformation, the computer divides the shell into many small triangles and calculates how the angles between triangles change and how much the sides of the triangles are stretched. What makes this difficult is that the shell vibrates in several different ways at once, and these modes of vibration are "coupled" -- energy transfers from one to another and back again. Previous methods of sound synthesis for shells did not take this into account, James said, and the result was a clean, clear sound, appropriate for bells and wind chimes, but not for things that crash and rumble.

The calculation must be stepped through time at audio frequencies, in this case seeing how the object will look every 1/44,100 of a second. Time-stepping a large mesh of triangles would take weeks of computer time, so the researchers approximate the response by sampling a few hundred triangles (out of thousands) and interpolate between them, a process they call "cubature."

The final step is to map out how the sound waves radiate to determine how the event will sound to a listener at any particular location. Calculating how vibrations of the object move the air is a standard, off-the-shelf process used by engineers who design real-world objects (a lot of work goes into making machinery quieter), but it's too slow for sound synthesis, so the radiation model is pre-computed to save time.

Even with these refinements, the system is not ready for real time, James reported. The computations for simple demonstrations still take about an hour on a laptop computer.

"There's some hope that we can speed this up," he said, "by making other approximations." Nevertheless, he said, previous methods of generating these sounds could take weeks, "but now we can do it in hours." The work on thin shells is part of a larger project in James' lab to synthesize a variety of sounds, including those of dripping and splashing fluids, small objects clattering together and shattering glass.