Flyer A. IFHOH congress, Budapest 2022 Vibrotactile aids in daily living solutions
Vibrotactile aids in daily living solutions
When your ears cannot hear, let your whole body do the job. This is the case for some deafened persons, even with ABI or CI as they might not benefit from the devices in their full capacity or do so with minimal benefit. There might also be contraindications. Furthermore, the devices might be unreachable for people in the developing countries.
The figure on the poster is showing the body percept of a sentence. As you can see, there is still a lot of information coming through the body, the main element being the prosody, that is pitch and intensity characteristics. This information is conveyed through the touch-based methods. Those can be combined with the visual communication methods either within a conversation or in enjoying music. The vibration alerts on smart phones also use sense of touch to relay the information.
Traditionally people with no acoustical hearing have used their palm under the jawbone on the side of the neck of the speaker to get a bone-conductive bridge from the speaker to the listener. However, in the times of Covid-19 and social distancing the longer the wooden spoon or shoehorn, the better the listener can maintain social distancing while keeping at optimal lipreading distance.
The best vibrations are via juniper, maple, ash, rowantree and Canary Island pine. They give deep vibrations. We wish for better research co-operation with acousticians and timber specialists, as there are situations one cannot use electric devices, such as in the rain or when swimming. Also, these natural solutions function in hot and humid conditions without circuit breaks.
The specialised vibrotactile aids have been developed for speech perception to support lipreading. However, despite all effort, they in some cases provide mainly environmental soundscape rather than speech parameters. Pitch and intonation patterns are the main elements of speech suitable for tactile perception. Some vibrotactile aids widen the scope by coding higher frequency bands in transducer electrodes with specific vibratory locations, and their use needs to be learned.
The best experience usually comes by trial, error and thinking out-of-the-box. In a concert one can use leather handbags, balloons - or the metal handrails in the venue to listen to music. Then you can let the music flow through you and not just surround you. Let the soles of your feet and your chest participate in the music listening - this is most obvious in a rock concert with loud bass sounds when the music literally rocks you.
You can also listen to pre-recorded music with a loudspeaker that fits like a glove, it is fit for purpose and nice to touch, but you have to find out the best-fitting glove for yourself. With a vibroacoustic cushion you can hug your favourite music! That allows more indepth feel of musical vibrations. Both devices are wireless using Bluetooth
There is a need for new wireless touch-based solutions which would benefit not only deafened people but also others in need for meaningful, communicative touch for increased quality-of-life.
Wanted:
- A keen developer
- Future end-users
Contact:
Liisa Sammalpenger, Deafened Committee of Finnish Hearing Association Kuuloliitto
Stina
Ojala, PhD,
researcher
Department
of Computing, University of Turku
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