@conference{
author = "Đinović, Zoran and Pavelka, Robert and Tomić, Miloš and Spinzl, Georg",
year = "2023",
abstract = "Currently, more than 1.5 billion people (nearly 20% of the world population) are living with hearing loss. By 2050, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss and at least 700 million will require hearing rehabilitation. While conventional hearing aids greatly improve the lives of people with hearing difficulties, they cause problems by being worn externally (e.g. stigma, bathing). We present here an innovative implantable hearing aid microphone that, when combined with a cochlear implant, could represent a fully internal hearing aid. To achieve an internal microphone, our technology utilizes a novel fiber-optic approach. The fiber-optic sensor is a kind of an optical vibrometer aimed to be used as a totally implantable fiber-optic microphone for hearing aids. The sensor is invisible as it is placed inside the human middle ear and is capable to detect the amplitude of the incus vibrations over the range of few picometers to a couple of nanometers, which corresponds to an SPL of about 35 to 90 dB. The basic operation principle is high-coherence fiber-optic interferometry. Online signal processing allows permanent conversion of the acoustical into an electrical signal over the audio frequency range from 100 Hz to 8 kHz in real time.",
publisher = "BIT Group Global",
journal = "The 9th Annual World Congress of Advanced Materials-2023, May 08-10, 2023, Tokyo, Japan",
title = "Totally Implantable Fiber-Optic Sensing System (TIFOS) - A Step Toward Totally Implantable Hearing Aids (TIHA)",
url = "https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_dais_16294"
}
