A cochlear implant and a method of speech conversion in a cochlear implant

摘要

It is an object of the present invention to provide a cochlear implant and a method speech conversion in the cochlear implant which can provide a user a speech of almost natural feeling and can regenerate a natural variation at a value near the natural period of respective channels. according to the present invention there is provided a method of speech conversion in a cochlear implant in which an electrode array of a plurality of electrodes is arranged within a cochlea, electrically stimulating pulses are generated by transmitting speech information sampled via a microphone to the electrodes, and the acoustic sense is reinforced by transmitting the speech information to the cochlea as electrically stimulating pulses characterized in that the method comprises steps of: discriminating the speech information into respective frequency bands using a plurality of band pass filters within a signal frame being a predetermined sampling period, adding an information of a channel corresponding to the frequency band to the speech information, adjusting the number of the stimulating pulses to a frequency allowed in one channel by leaving in respective channels a speech information having a higher signal level in one channel, adjusting the number of the stimulating pulses to a frequency allowed in all channels by leaving a speech information having a higher signal level in all speech information left in respective channels. and generating the stimulating pulses by providing the left speech information to the electrode corresponding to the channel.