In designing a tactile aid, the most important considerations are that a device provide useful information and that it be wearable. While electrotactile rather than vibrotactile devices are more easily made wearable, results with these devices to date have been disappointing. One exception to this has been the Tickle Talker (Univ. of Melbourne). The Tickle Talker is an eight‐channel device, worn as rings on the fingers of one hand, with a electrode placed on either side of each finger. The processor performs a formant extraction, displaying an estimated fundamental frequency, second formant frequency, and the amplitude of the speech signal. In an attempt to corroborate early promising results [Cowan et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 85, 2593–2607 (1989)], this device was evaluated with three normally hearing adult subjects. In initial testing with closed set tasks done under a tactile aid alone condition, subjects on the average were able to identify the manner of production of stimuli 76% of the time, presence or absence of voicing 74% of the time, and medial vowel 81% of the time. Wearing the tactile aid in conjunction with lipreading raised subjects' scores on a subsequent closed set identification task from 57% lipreading alone to 72% with the device. Results to date with connected discourse tracking also show improvements with the device. [Work supported by NIH.]

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