Programmable Digital Speech Processor for Auditory Prostheses

Auditory prosthesis (AP) is a widely used electronic device for patients suffering with severe hearing loss by electrically stimulating the auditory nerve using an electrode array surgically placed inside the inner ear. The AP also known as cochlear implant (CI) mainly contains external Body worn Speech Processor (BWSP) and internal Implantable Receiver Stimulator (IRS). BWSP receives an external sound or speech and generates encoded speech data bits for transmission to IRS via Radio Frequency transcutaneous link for excitation of electrode array placed in the inner ear. Development of BWSP and IRS involves normally the use of either standard microprocessor or microcontroller or digital signal processor (DSP) or FPGA or ASIC devices. Sometimes the performance of the AP system using the standard processors cannot meet the requirement of the intended application. As the selected DSP processor (ADSP2185) from Analog Devices Inc. solely cannot perform the purpose of the speech processor for auditory prostheses, the Xilinx FPGA is added to fulfill the requirement. Combination of a standard processor such as DSP and FPGA may lead to the solution in both prototyping and target operational system. The ADSP2185 processor is used to realize the Continuous Interleaved Sampling (CIS) algorithm for speech signal processing and FPGA is used to realize the speech data encoding algorithm. This paper introduces practical implementations of digital speech processor for use in AP based on DSP ADSP-2185 and Xilinx's FPGA Spartan 3 with the description of practical data. The combination of ADSP2185 and FPGA is used to develop Speech Processor for an auditory prosthesis. FPGA implementation of speech data encoder is initially simulated using ModelSim and interfaced with ADSP2185. The entire embedded application is tested with real time speech signals by using laboratory model IRS and satisfactory results are observed.

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Clinical programming software to manage patient's data with a Cochlear implantat

Rao

Ramaiah

Kumar

2013

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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Auditory prostheses (AP) using Cochlear Implant System a.k.a bionic ears are widely used electronic devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve using an electrode array, surgically placed in the inner ear for patients suffering from severe to profound senosorineural deafness. The AP mainly contains an external Body Worn Speech Processor (BWSP) and an internal Implantable Receiver Stimulator (IRS). The BWSP receives an external sound or speech and generates encoded speech data bits for transmission to the IRS via a Radio Frequency transcutaneous link to excite the electrode array. After surgical placement of the electrode array in the inner ear, the BWSP should be fine-tuned to achieve the 80 to 100% speech reception abilities of the patient by an audiologist using Clinical Programming Software (CPS). The tuning process involves several tasks such as identifying the active electrode contacts, determining the detection and pain threshold of each active electrode, and loading these values into BWSP by reprogramming the BWSP. The main objective of this paper is to describe a simple personal-computer based, user-friendly CPS, which fine tunes the BWSP to achieve the best possible speech reception abilities of each patient and to perform post-operative fitting procedures by an audiologist. The CPS was developed to perform the post-operative fine tuning procedures such as (i) measurement of electrode tissue impedance, (ii) fitting to determine the hearing threshold and comfort levels for each active electrode, and (iii) reprogramming the speech processor using the identified threshold and comfort values. Finally, experimental results are presented.

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Programmable Digital Speech Processor for Auditory Prostheses

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Advanced Safety Analysis and Modeling of Control Software in Implantable Medical Devices

Advanced Safety Analysis and Modeling of Control Software in Implantable Medical Devices

A practical approach to speech processor for auditory prosthesis using DSP and FPGA

Clinical programming software to manage patient's data with a Cochlear implantat

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