Clinical Validation of the Ansi C63.19 Draft Standard for Measuring Compatibility between Digital Wireless Phones and Hearing Aids

Acoustic interference can be generated in hearing aids by the pulsed transmission signal of a digital wireless phone. This interference, resembling a buzzing, clicking, or static sound, is annoying and can seriously degrade the intelligibility of the speech. The objective of the ANSI C63.19 Draft Standard is to provide a simple, reliable test procedure for measuring the immunity of hearing aids to this interference. To clinically validate the standard, hearing aids were custom manufactured for eighteen hearing-impaired participants. The participants rated the effects of the interference experienced when using five digital wireless phone technologies (CDMA at 800 and 1900 MHz, TDMA-50 Hz at 800 and 1900 MHz, and TDMA-217 Hz at 1900 MHz) at five transmission power levels (0, 6, 12, 18, and 24 dBm). More than two-thirds of the subjects responded as predicted by acoustic measurements of the interference. The remaining subjects experienced difficulties unrelated to wireless phone interference due to severe hearing loss or excessive feedback. These results support the use of acoustic measurements of immunity as the basis for the ANSI C63.19 standard.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Toward the Construction of an Efficient Set of Robot Arm Operator Performance Metrics

As part of a larger project to identify and validate relevant quantitative measures of robot arm operator proficiency, fifteen metrics of arm maneuvering and hand controller performance were defined and measured for 3-DOF translational movement tasks. Twelve freshly trained operators provided performance data for seven target-acquisition task scenarios involving a variety of distance combinations along the X, Y, and Z axes. Metrics included indicators of task component times, distance traveled, inefficient (inverse) motion, maximum velocities, amount of multi-axis control, and input control onset times along the three axes. Pairwise correlations of all measures and scatter plots of variables yielding strong intercorrelations were examined to determine the potential underlying causes of the significant relationships. By identifying subsets of metrics with explainable co-dependencies, the overall metric set can be reduced to a limited number of key metrics that serve as effective discriminators of operator performance.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline