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
An active bone conduction device, comprising:
- an actuator configured to be subcutaneously implanted within a recipient so as to deliver mechanical output forces to hard tissue of the recipient;
- an audio driver configured to deliver actuator drive signals to the actuator;
- and
- 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 active bone conduction device of claim 7, wherein the rechargeable power supply of the energy recovery tank circuit has a charge capacity of at least 10 times higher than the charge capacity of the low-ESR capacitance of the actuator.
The active bone conduction device of claim 11, wherein the multi-bit delta-sigma converter is a sixteen-bit audio converter and wherein the scaled sigma-delta quantization threshold value is configurable.
The active bone conduction device of claim 11, further comprising:
- an implantable coil configured to receive control data from an external device, wherein the control data comprises the scaled sigma-delta quantization threshold value.
The active bone conduction device of claim 13, wherein the scaled sigma-delta quantization threshold value is programmable at the external device.
A bone conduction device, comprising:
- a sigma-delta converter configured to receive audio signals and to convert those audio signals into sigma-delta signals, wherein the sigma-delta converter operates to scale the sigma-delta signals when the audio signals have an amplitude that is below a predetermined threshold level;
- an implantable actuator comprising a capacitive element;
- an audio driver configured to deliver the sigma-delta signals to the actuator in a manner that charges and discharges the capacitive element;
- and
- an energy recovery circuit configured to extract energy from the capacitive element while the capacitive element discharges and to add energy to the capacitive element while the capacitive element charges.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.