Proposed use of a digital signal processor in an experimental tactile hearing aid for the profoundly deaf: preliminary communication.

An experimental system for a tactile hearing aid using a digital signal processor (DSP) is being developed. This system can be used to test and evaluate not only the familiar techniques for a tactile hearing aid, such as energy level display, filterbank analysis, etc., but also novel techniques. The system is being developed especially to try out new recognition strategies, because the currently available strategies are not satisfactory. A portable tactile hearing aid that can recognize certain environmental sounds (alarm sounds) and certain features from the speech signal (such as pitch, voiced/voiceless, or even complete phonemes), being a good support for lipreading, should be the final result of the experiments.