Low-power active bone conduction devices
AssigneeCochlear Limited
InventorsWerner Meskens, Wim Bervoets, Carl Van Himbeeck
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Abstract
Presented herein are low-power active bone conduction devices that comprise an actuator that is subcutaneously implanted within a recipient so as to deliver mechanical output forces to hard tissue of the recipient. The low-power active bone conduction devices include an energy recovery circuit configured to extract non-used energy from the actuator and to store the non-used energy for subsequent use by the actuator. The low-power active bone conduction devices may also include a multi-bit sigma-delta converter that operates in accordance with a scaled sigma-delta quantization threshold value to convert received signals representative of sound into actuator drive signals.
Claims20
A hearing prosthesis, comprising:
- one or more sound input elements configured to receive sound signals;
- and
- a sigma-delta converter circuit comprising a sigma-delta converter, wherein the sigma-delta converter circuit is configured to convert electrical signals representative of the sound signals into a serialized bit stream of sigma-delta pulses and to perform scaling of the sigma-delta pulses using a scaled sigma-delta quantization threshold level to limit a number of sigma-delta pulses in the serialized bit stream, wherein the circuit performs the scaling only when a level of the electrical signals representative of the sound signals is below an audio threshold level.
A hearing prosthesis, comprising:
- an audio driver having first and second sides;
- and
- a multi-bit sigma-delta converter circuit comprising a multi-bit sigma-delta converter, wherein the multi-bit sigma-delta converter circuit is configured to receive a set of audio signals and to convert the set of audio signals into first and second sets of sigma-delta signals for delivery to the first and second sides, respectively, of the audio driver, wherein the multi-bit sigma-delta converter circuit operates to scale the sigma-delta signals using a scaled sigma-delta quantization threshold to introduce distortion into the first and second sets of sigma-delta signals only when the set of audio signals has an amplitude that is below a predetermined threshold.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.