Quality-of-life technology for vision and hearing loss

Rehabilitation and Research Priorities in Deafblindness for the Next Decade

Purpose

Previous studies have guided the development of deafblindness rehabilitation by reporting on the priorities of researchers and of deafblind individuals; however, service and care providers may be able to bring a different and important perspective to shaping the development of this clinical field and its research. The present study aims to give them a voice in this process.

Methods

We conducted a qualitative survey in which 68 stakeholders in deaf-blind rehabilitation from 6 countries described their perceived research and rehabilitation priorities for the coming decade. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis through open coding, creating categories, and abstraction.

Results

Three categories of priorities emerged: those common to rehabilitation and research (such as assistive technology, communication services, and interdisciplinarity), those unique to rehabilitation (such as augmented service provision), and those unique to research (such as recruitment databases and measurement tools).

Conclusions

When viewing the findings from within the context of the existing research literature, the overlap indicated that research and rehabilitation efforts are moving in a congruent direction for researchers, service providers, and persons with deafblindness. Future efforts should focus on information exchange in order to improve evidence-based rehabilitation practice.

A 1.2-V 165-μW 0.29-mm2 multibit Sigma-Delta ADC for hearing aids using nonlinear DACs and with over 91 dB dynamic-range

This paper describes the design and experimental evaluation of a multibit Sigma-Delta (ΣΔ) modulator (ΣΔM) with enhanced dynamic range (DR) through the use of nonlinear digital-to-analog converters (DACs) in the feedback paths. This nonlinearity imposes a trade-off between DR and distortion, which is well suited to the intended hearing aid application. The modulator proposed here uses a fully-differential self-biased amplifier and a 4-bit quantizer based on fully dynamic comparators employing MOS parametric pre-amplification to improve both energy and area efficiencies. A test chip was fabricated in a 130 nm digital CMOS technology, which includes the proposed modulator with nonlinear DACs and a modulator with conventional linear DACs, for comparison purposes. The measured results show that the ΣΔM using nonlinear DACs achieves an enhancement of the DR around 8.4 dB (to 91.4 dB). Power dissipation and silicon area are about the same for the two cases. The performance achieved is comparable to that of the best reported multibit ΣΔ ADCs, with the advantage of occupying less silicon area (7.5 times lower area when compared with the most energy efficient ΣΔM).