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Mobile Phone in Your Teeth!
thumbtack writes "News.com is running a story that reports that British researchers claim to have developed an implant that could be placed in a tooth and used as a mobile phone. According to the article, the sound would be transferred to the inner ear by bone resonance, and could be listened too anytime anywhere, with complete privacy." This is awesome. Course it would kinda suck if your phone rang when you were asleep.
Specially when it's been announced today that mobile phones pose a health risk.
Pretty wicked though.
Once the work out the mike issue this could mean *apparent* telepathy. Remember, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I can think of a dozen ethically iffy uses. Think: two people collaborating in a poker game, getting answers to questions on the SAT, a Miss Universe contestant could hear the question from a spy in the audience, even though she's in the isolation booth, etc.
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Ya, doesn't anyone watch old movies? Its all a plot by the phone company to implant phones directly in our heads. James Coburn is cool.
Much depends on why it is you've become hearing impaired. There are three sections of the ear, external, middle, and inner. This kind of thing would only help those with external ear problems, as it still relies on the middle ear and inner ear to pick up the sounds. As it happens, many external and middle ear problems are correctable already via surgery or other medical treatment. Folks with inner ear problems -- that is, those with neural damage -- wouldn't be helped at all, and would rely on technology such as cochlear implants.
On the other hand, I know my father (who is significantly hearing impaired) absolutely hates many aspects of his hearing aids. He has to deal with fit, visibility, feedback from the compact size that places the mic near the speaker, etc. Sounds like this sort of thing could make one heck of a stealth-device for people like him.
The news.com story leads you to believe that these researchers have developed a tooth phone. This is in fact not the case. Instead, they have developed the technology to allow signals (not specifically cell phone) to be transimitted to your inner ear through bone resonance. This is much cooler because aside from the obvious security issues, it is much more versatile and could easily be "turned off." I still wonder about how they plan to power it though...
"Essentially the futuristic tooth would use wireless technology, such as 802.11 or bluetooth, to take signals from audio devices such as mobile phones, radios, stereos or computers, Auger [one of the two main researchers] explained to ElectricNews.Net. These signals would be changed into vibrations that would travel from the tooth, to the skull, eventually creating audible sound in the user's inner ear. No one but the user would be able to hear the sounds."
A more accurate story from ElectricNews
Also of interest is this site. It is James Auger's personal site about his research. It was up before, but I was having some problems with it moments ago.
For certain kinds of hearing loss, where the nerves are still intact, a "cochlear implant" can be used. A microphone goes on the outside, and transmits through the skull to a receiver inside, which then passes the sound on to the cochlea (the spiral-shaped bit in your ear that the auditory nerve endings are in). This bypasses the eardrum and middle ear, helpful for, say, people whose deafness is caused because the bones in the ear have fused.
This is my very not-a-doctor recollection of it. Here's some pages on cochlear implants from Google that would give more info.
I think this is related to the idea you're getting at, though it's a different technology.
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It's been a few years, but I've used earpieces that have built in bone condution mikes, and I believe these are pretty common. (we used them in a club I worked in.)
Basically, it's an ear piece that fits in your ear, and the mike is built in. Somehow (don't know how) it picks up the vibration of your jaw.
So, if you can buy this tech for cheap at radio shack, then someone, somewhere has to have miniturized it to fit on the rest of the piece.
And, as an added bonus, it doesn't pick up background noise, so you can mumble under your breath in a crowded club, and the people at the other end can hear you fine.
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To pick up where Pedersen left off, the cochlea is a fluid filled snail-shell shaped tube that is lined with small hairs. The hairs are hooked to nerve endings. The final bone in the three bone series causes the fluid to vibrate, moving the hairs, and the nerves pick that motion up. IIRC, the length of the hair and the diameter of the tube are used to differentiate frequencies. I'm not too sure on that last bit, however.
Murphy was an optimist.
Normally, I don't get so upset at this sort of thing, but for some reason, idiocy like this has pissed me off today. No, the eardrum does NOT translate vibrations to sound, or any other such nonsense.What the eardrum (or timpanum) does is to act as the first step in hearing something.
Which is good, because you don't know much about how the ear works either. It works like this:
Sound waves travel through the air and into your ear. The pressure from the waves causes a flap of skin to vibrate back and forth due to the difference of pressure between one side and another of the flap. That flap is called your ear drum.
The vibrations cause the pressure inside the ear to change also, and cause the tiny bones in the ear to vibrate. Those bones transfer the vibrationss to the cochlea, a hollow tube-shaped spiral like thing with fluid inside.
On the inside of the cochlea, there are tiny hairs attached to nerve endings, kind of like the flagella of organisms, except when they move they generate an electrical charge that is picked up on the nerves. The cochlea has a tube that is at first large and goes down in size. As it does so, the resonant frequency also does and that's how we can perceive different frequencies. That's why a lot of times people compare the ear's function to that of a Fourier transform, because it is able to take a sound of many frequencies and break it down into each frequency and determine the relative amplitude of each one using the hairs and different sized tubes.
The nerves carry the electrical charges to the auditory center of the brain where they are processed in a very advanced way that even includes how your ear is shaped and depends on it to tune the directional mechanism. There was actually an experiment that changed the shape of the outer ear and as a result the brain had to relearn the new shape and during this process the subject couldn't tell where sounds were coming from. So there is a significant amount of critical engineering here and as you can imagine the human ear is a complex work of art and technically advanced.
Now what is interesting about this tooth speaker (what I call it) is that somehow they are using the skull to transfer the pressure waves (sounds) to the cochlea. There's nothing wrong with that -- actually you can even hear your own body's noises by covering your ears and those are transmitted largely by bone and tissue. You can even hear a very high frequency noise that your nervous system produces when neurons produce a certain response every 1.5 seconds.
My question is that the ear has evolved to be designed so well and so intricately and is a better design than any sound engineer could come up with. Obviously the quality and frequency range of sounds depends on its transfer medium -- for example you can hear many low frequency sounds through wood and all sorts of materials but high frequency doesn't travel well over tighly packed materials, such as solids. The last time I checked bone was pretty solid.
So how are they getting pased that fact, and will it sound like listening to a loud speaker pressed up against wood? I'll bet they have a frequency model of how sound is carried from the tooth to the skull and then to the inner ear, and dynamically adjust the frequencies to represent that model. I'd better hope so or it won't sound too good.
Still though, I can see where this could have applications for those who have had accidents and have problems with their ear drum, etc. Of course there is surgery but in the mean time you can stick one of these things in your mouth and be back to normal (or at least something like it). For the rest of us if the sound quality is good enough it could be the ultimate headphone, but that's really all I see it as being marketed as in the commercial, consumer world.
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