• Korean Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.311-323
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• 2021

Objective: The disabled are in a blind spot for obtaining information on drugs, and the pharmacies' counseling on drug use is centered on non-disabled people. Few studies have investigated the current statuses of drug use by type of disability. The purpose of this study is to understand the drug use by type of disability and by life cycle of visually impaired and hearing impaired in Korea. Methods: The study participants consisted of 16 people with visually impairments, 12 people with hearing impairments. One in-depth interview was conducted per participant, and each interview was recorded and documented. Results: Common barriers against safe medication and medical service uses across disability types are 'lack of consideration and service for the disabled, limited access to medical facilities due to disability, limited access to information regarding medication use, psychological anxiety about drug use and side effects, and inconvenience regarding COVID-19 epidemic. The specific factors were 'difficulties in identifying proper medicines and following prescribed dosages' in the case of visually impaired, and 'problems with sign language interpretation system' for the hearing impaired. Conclusion: Disabled people are hindered from using medicines properly due to various factors. Based on the content derived from this study, it is necessary to eliminate the inhibition factors and devise specific measures for the safety of each type of disorder such as developing a method for medication counseling considering disabilities and establishing communication support systems.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2010

For hearing-impaired students, it is known that reading ability is the most important means of communication. In the meanwhile, with recent development of wireless communication technologies, mobile devices are used in various education fields. The purpose of this study is to design and implement a mobile system to improve reading ability of hearing-impaired students. For this purpose, "Question Generation Strategy", known as one of the effective methods for improving reading ability, is adopted to make study contents. Also, 2Bi (Bilingual-Bicultural) Approach Model, an attractive model for improving reading ability of hearing-impaired students, is used. Characteristics of the proposed mobile system are as follows. First, the system is developed to let students learn written language usage through repetition and difference of two organically-related curriculums for hearing-impaired students. Second, study contents are made to increase sentence understanding ability using an activity that is to let students read articles, make questions and answer questions for themselves. Third, the proposed system is designed and implemented to allow students to choose study contents individually anytime anywhere depending on their study levels.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.70-78
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• 2021

The auditory information is used for urgent notification or warning in vehicle because it is not restricted by the direction compared to the visual. However, since the hearing impaired drivers cannot recognize sound signal, various methods of visualizing the auditory information have been attempted to replace it. When visualizing auditory information, only important information should be selected and provided to prevent cognitive overload concentrated on the vision. For this purpose, analysis of the type of auditory information in vehicle should be given in advance. In this study, the types of auditory information in vehicle were analyzed based on the user experience of hearing impaired drivers. Through the observation of the driving behavior of hearing impaired drivers, 33 auditory informations experienced in vehicle were collected. The collected auditory informations were classified into 12 groups through open card sorting by an expert group, and the types of auditory information in vehicle consisting of four levels were presented through a relative comparison of importance between groups. The presented type of auditory information in vehicle can be used as a guideline for selecting important information when the auditory information is converted into visual or tactile. This study is meaningful in that the user experience analysis was conducted by observing actual driving in daily life of hearing impaired drivers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.19-25
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• 2004

Hearing aids play an very important role in aural rehabilitation for hearing impaired person who could not be medically treated. Especially, hearing aids with dynamic range compression (level dependent frequency response: LDFR) method concentrated dynamic output range of receiver into the narrowing dynamic range of sensorineural hearing impaired person. Thus, if aided hearing threshold level is improved and uncomfortable loudness level rises, then the users of hearing aids are favored with extended dynamic range. This study aims to evaluate audiological benefits in dynamic range compression hearing aids. To achieve this, pure tone and speech audiometry were examined to 15 children and 3 adults with narrow dynamic range moderate-to-severe binaural sensorineural hearing loss.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.94-102
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a hearing impairment simulator considering reduced frequency selectivity of the hearing impaired, and verify it's performance through experiments. The reduced frequency selectivity was embodied by spectral smearing using linear prediction coding(LPC). The experiments are composed of 4 kinds of tests; pure tone test, speech reception threshold(SRT) test, and word recognition score(WRS) test without spectral smearing and with spectral smearing. The experiments of the hearing impairment simulator were performed with 9 subjects who have normal hearing. The amount of spectral smearing was controlled by LPC order. The percentile score of WRS test without smearing is $89.78{\pm}2.420%$. The scores of WRS with 24th LPC order and with 8th LPC order are $88.00{\pm}3.556%$ and $83.78{\pm}2.123%$ respectively. It is verified that WRS score is lowered by decreasing LPC order. This is a reasonable result considering that spectral smearing is getting heavier according to decreasing LPC order. It is confirmed that spectral smearing using LPC simulates the reduced frequency selectivity of the hearing impaired and affects the clearness of speech reception.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.732-743
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• 2007

Background noise is one of the major complaints of not only hearing impaired persons but also normal listeners. This paper describes the results of two experiments in which speech recognition performance was determined for listeners with normal hearing and sensorineural hearing loss in noise environment. First, we compared speech enhancement algorithms by evaluation speech recognition ability in various speech-to-noise ratios and types of noise. Next, speech enhancement algorithms by reducing background noise were presented and evaluated to improve speech intelligibility for sensorineural hearing impairment listeners. We tested three noise reduction methods using single-microphone, such as spectrum subtraction and companding, Wiener filter method, and maximum likelihood envelop estimation. Their responses in background noise were investigated and compared with those by the speech enhancement algorithm that presented in this paper. The methods improved speech recognition test score for the sensorineural hearing impaired listeners, but not for normal listeners. The results suggest the speech enhancement algorithm with the loudness compression can improve speech intelligibility for listeners with sensorineural hearing loss.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.129-131
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• 2009

Hearing loss is one of the most common birth defects among infants. Most hearing-impaired children are not diagnosed until one to three years of age, which is too late to treat for normal speech and language development. If a hearing impairment is identified and treated in its early stage, child's speech and language skills could be comparable to his or her normal-hearing peers. In this study, we applied the 'Fsp' method to distinguish between normal and impaired hearing. We have developed a battery-operated portable A - ABR(automated auditory brain stem response) system that automatically detects hearing impairment for neonates or infants in a nursery room, as well as in a sound-proof room. We partially validated the accuracy of the system in five normal-hearing adults.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.11-18
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• 2015

A person with defects and the lack of hearing, has very difficult problems to listen to the sound of conversation or environment, and these problems cause wrong directions in the linguistic sense and character. We designed and implemented an application to practice and correct pronunciation of a hearing-impaired person specially. This is made as a mobile app without the limitation of time and space, and this provides practices with the level of difficulty in learning of pronunciation, taking into consideration of remedial status in pronunciation. The hearing-impaired person can train the basic pronunciation and the word pronunciation. He or she can practice basic skills in pronunciation and check the record on the practice rate and the success rate. Also, the person can improve pronunciation by self-correction function using the front camera of a smart phone.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.85-96
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of articulatory intervention using visual phonics to improve the speech intelligibility of children with impaired hearing. The subjects of the study were five hearing impaired children. As per the results of the UTAP articulation tests, five phonemes with the most frequent errors were selected for each child and a total of 10 sessions were provided. The methodology involved analyzing vowel space and related measures (vowel space area, vowel articulatory index, formant centralization ratio, and F2i/F2u ratio) before and after the visual phonics intervention. After the articulation intervention, every child's speech intelligibility improved, their vowel space area was widened, the FCR value decreased, and the F2ratio value increased. These results show that the use of visual phonics through symbolic images and hand clues has a positive effect in terms of improving the speech intelligibility of children with impaired hearing.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1996 no.05
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• pp.240-242
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• 1996

In this paper, we proposed a method of a hearing aid suitable for the sensorineural hearing impaired. Generally as the sensorineural hearing impaired have narrow audible ranges between threshold and discomfortable level, the speech spectrum may easily go beyond their audible range. Therefore speech spectrum must be optimally amplified and compressed into the impaired's audible range. The level and frequency of input speech signal are varied continuously. So we have to make compensation input signal for frequency-gain loss of the impaired, specially in the frequency band which includes much information. The input sigaal is divided into short time block and spectrum within the block is calculated. The frequency-gain characteristic is determined using the calculated spectrum. The number of frequency band and the target gain which will be added input signal are estimated. The input signal within the block is processed by a single digital filter with the calculated frequency-gain characteristics. From the results of monosyllabic speech tests to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the scores of test were improved.