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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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2017-11, Vol.17 (11), p.2515
Main Authors: Liu, Houguang, Cheng, Jinlei, Yang, Jianhua, Rao, Zhushi, Cheng, Gang, Yang, Shanguo, Huang, Xinsheng, Wang, Mengli
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Auditory defects
Deafness
Ear
Ear Ossicles
evaluation studies
Harmonic distortion
Hearing Aids
Hearing loss
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Hearing protection
Humans
implantable middle ear hearing device
incus body
Middle ear
New technology
piezoelectric stack
piezoelectric transducer
Prosthesis Design
Sound pressure
temporal bone
Transducers
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Summary: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 (
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s17112515