Tactile Aids for the Hearing Impaired

Tactile aids can offer a particularly cost-effective answer to the increasing demand for technical aids for the profoundly and totally deaf. This book covers the design of tactile aids - single and multichannel - and the ways in which they may benefit the hearing impaired. Authors from Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA have contributed chapters, and among the topics they cover are: fundamentals of vibrotactile and electrotactile perception; signal processing strategies; tactile coding (including synthetic Tadoma); choice of subjects and subject training; evaluation of tactile aids and comparison with cochlear implants; and communication for the deaf-blind. The book should provide a useful reference for those who work with the profoundly deaf, students and others with interests in the perception of speech and environmental sound.