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Hearable devices have been developing as one of wearable devices.
The hearable devices consist of microphone, loudspeaker, and signal processing unit. The purpose of hearable devices is assisting or extending our hearing. Some of the functions are acoustic noise reduction, auto translation, health checking, acoustical augmented reality, etc. Of course, we can enjoy music and speech communication via hearable devices. To add effective and convenient functions to hearable devices, we are trying to implement technologies we developed. |  |
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Although we do not have the machines and technologies to manufacture a hearable device,
we can simulate the hearable device as illustrated in the Figure.
In a practical situation, our eardrums get a sound processed by the hearable device. In our simulation, we use the dummy head to capture the sound at the location of the eardrum. |  |
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The dummy head has the interior microphone at the location of the eardrum.
We additionally put the binaural microphone, which consists of the outside microphone and the inside loudspeaker, on the ear of the dummy head. The binaural microphone sends the sound from the outside microphone to the signal processing device (DSP), and transmits the processed sound by the DSP from the inside loudspeaker. We can get a sound on the eardrum by using the interior microphone of the dummy head, and analyze and evaluate the sound. |  |
| This Figure shows the experimental room. There are the dummy head, DSP, PC for programming the DSP, and PC for capturing sound. |  |
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Our purpose is to develop the VLSI which plays a role of a high-quality and high-speed speech processing system.
We are trying to replace the DSP with FPGA to implement the high-speed signal processing system. |  |