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Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device

Implantable middle ear hearing devices (IMEHDs) have been developed as a new technology to overcome the limitations of conventional hearing aids. The piezoelectric cantilever transducers currently used in the IMEHDs have the advantages of low power consumption and ease of fabrication, but generate l...

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Autores principales: Liu, Houguang, Cheng, Jinlei, Yang, Jianhua, Rao, Zhushi, Cheng, Gang, Yang, Shanguo, Huang, Xinsheng, Wang, Mengli
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5713124/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29099047
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17112515
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author Liu, Houguang
Cheng, Jinlei
Yang, Jianhua
Rao, Zhushi
Cheng, Gang
Yang, Shanguo
Huang, Xinsheng
Wang, Mengli
author_facet Liu, Houguang
Cheng, Jinlei
Yang, Jianhua
Rao, Zhushi
Cheng, Gang
Yang, Shanguo
Huang, Xinsheng
Wang, Mengli
author_sort Liu, Houguang
collection PubMed
description Implantable middle ear hearing devices (IMEHDs) have been developed as a new technology to overcome the limitations of conventional hearing aids. The piezoelectric cantilever transducers currently used in the IMEHDs have the advantages of low power consumption and ease of fabrication, but generate less high-frequency output. To address this problem, we proposed and designed a new piezoelectric transducer based on a piezoelectric stack for the IMEHD. This new transducer, attached to the incus body with a coupling rod, stimulates the ossicular chain in response to the expansion-and-contraction of its piezoelectric stack. To test its feasibility for hearing loss compensation, a bench testing of the transducer prototype and a temporal bone experiment were conducted, respectively. Bench testing results showed that the new transducer did have a broad frequency bandwidth. Besides, the transducer was found to have a low total harmonic distortion (<0.75%) in all frequencies, and small release time (1 ms). The temporal bone experiment further proved that the transducer has the capability to produce sufficient vibrations to compensate for severe sensorineural hearing loss, especially at high frequencies. This property benefits the treatment of the most common sloping high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss. To produce a 100 dB SPL equivalent sound pressure at 1 kHz, its power consumption is 0.49 mW, which is low enough for the transducer to be utilized in the IMEHD.
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spelling pubmed-57131242017-12-07 Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device Liu, Houguang Cheng, Jinlei Yang, Jianhua Rao, Zhushi Cheng, Gang Yang, Shanguo Huang, Xinsheng Wang, Mengli Sensors (Basel) Article Implantable middle ear hearing devices (IMEHDs) have been developed as a new technology to overcome the limitations of conventional hearing aids. The piezoelectric cantilever transducers currently used in the IMEHDs have the advantages of low power consumption and ease of fabrication, but generate less high-frequency output. To address this problem, we proposed and designed a new piezoelectric transducer based on a piezoelectric stack for the IMEHD. This new transducer, attached to the incus body with a coupling rod, stimulates the ossicular chain in response to the expansion-and-contraction of its piezoelectric stack. To test its feasibility for hearing loss compensation, a bench testing of the transducer prototype and a temporal bone experiment were conducted, respectively. Bench testing results showed that the new transducer did have a broad frequency bandwidth. Besides, the transducer was found to have a low total harmonic distortion (<0.75%) in all frequencies, and small release time (1 ms). The temporal bone experiment further proved that the transducer has the capability to produce sufficient vibrations to compensate for severe sensorineural hearing loss, especially at high frequencies. This property benefits the treatment of the most common sloping high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss. To produce a 100 dB SPL equivalent sound pressure at 1 kHz, its power consumption is 0.49 mW, which is low enough for the transducer to be utilized in the IMEHD. MDPI 2017-11-02 /pmc/articles/PMC5713124/ /pubmed/29099047 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17112515 Text en © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Liu, Houguang
Cheng, Jinlei
Yang, Jianhua
Rao, Zhushi
Cheng, Gang
Yang, Shanguo
Huang, Xinsheng
Wang, Mengli
Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device
title Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device
title_full Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device
title_fullStr Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device
title_full_unstemmed Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device
title_short Concept and Evaluation of a New Piezoelectric Transducer for an Implantable Middle Ear Hearing Device
title_sort concept and evaluation of a new piezoelectric transducer for an implantable middle ear hearing device
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5713124/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29099047
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17112515
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