Single-sided deafness (SSD) significantly restricts social participation in hearing/speaking cultures due to the person’s difficulty hearing conversations on their deaf side. Although hearing aids for SSD are effective in social situations, the acceptance rate remains low at 4%. To address this problem, we designed and developed a bone conduction-based device to be worn with eyeglasses, involving 53 individuals with SSD including two authors. We conducted a four-week diary study comparing our proposed device with traditional Contralateral Routing of Signals (CROS) hearing aids and explored the factors that might affect the acceptance rate of assistive devices for SSD. The findings indicated that our design was more acceptable for users with SSD due to its effectiveness, social acceptability, and the ability for wearers to use other devices simultaneously, such as earbuds. Based on our results, we discuss implications for designing wearable assistive devices to promote greater acceptance among the target population.

The advancement of semiconductor and battery technologies popularized tiny acoustic wearable devices such as bone conduction wireless headsets. However, this small form factor poses inconvenience when controlling these devices, as they cannot equip large footprint intuitive interfaces such as volume sliders and touch screens. This paper presents a technique using acoustic responses measured by a bone conduction speaker and a microphone to utilize the ear as a touch input interface. We discovered that a finger placed on different parts of the ear affects the acoustic radiation characteristic of the ear, modulating the leaked sound, and by leveraging this effect, the touch position can be estimated. Experimental results show that five distinct frequency responses with five different finger positions can be obtained, which indicates that our method could allow bone conduction headsets to capture continuous finger positions without additional hardware.

Human environments are physically supported by floors, which prevent people and furniture from gravitational pull. Since our body motions continuously generate vibrations and loads that propagate into the ground, measurement of these expressive signals leads to unobtrusive activity sensing. In this study, we present Flexel, a modular floor interface for room-scale tactile sensing. By paving a room with floor interfaces, our system can immediately begin to infer touch locations, track user locations, recognize foot gestures, and detect object locations. Through a series of exploratory studies, we determined the preferable hardware design that adheres to construction conventions, as well as the optimal sensor density that mediates the trade-off between cost and performance. We summarize our findings into design guidelines that are generalizable to other floor interfaces. Finally, we provide example applications for room-scale tactile sensing enabled by our Flexel system.