Department of Mechanical Engineering, École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), 1100 Rue Notre-Dame O, Montréal, Québec, H3C 1K3, Canada.
Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, CRMBM, UMR 7339, Marseille, France.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Oct;146(4):2452. doi: 10.1121/1.5126857.
In-ear devices are used in a wide range of applications for which the device's usability and/or efficiency is strongly related to comfort aspects that are influenced by the mechanical interaction between the device and the walls of the earcanal. Although the displacement of the earcanal walls due to the insertion of the device is an important characteristic of this interaction, existing studies on this subject are very limited. This paper proposes a method to estimate this displacement in vivo using a registration technique on magnetic resonance images. The amplitude, the location and the direction of the earcanal wall displacement are computed for four types of earplugs used by one participant. These displacements give indications on how each earplug deforms the earcanal for one specific earcanal geometry and one specific earplug insertion. Although the displacement due to a specific earplug family cannot be generalized using the results of this paper, the latter help to understand where, how much, and how each studied earplug deforms the earcanal of the participant. This method is revealed as a promising tool to investigate further acoustical and physical comfort aspects of in-ear devices.
入耳式设备在广泛的应用中使用，设备的可用性和/或效率与舒适度密切相关，而舒适度受到设备与耳道壁之间的机械相互作用的影响。尽管由于设备插入而导致的耳道壁位移是这种相互作用的一个重要特征，但关于这个主题的现有研究非常有限。本文提出了一种使用磁共振图像上的配准技术来估计体内这种位移的方法。针对一名参与者使用的四种耳塞，计算了耳道壁位移的幅度、位置和方向。这些位移提供了关于每个耳塞如何为特定的耳道几何形状和特定的耳塞插入而使耳道变形的指示。尽管使用本文的结果无法对特定耳塞家族的位移进行概括，但这些结果有助于了解每个研究耳塞在何处、多少以及如何使参与者的耳道变形。该方法被证明是一种很有前途的工具，可以进一步研究入耳式设备的声学和物理舒适度方面。
