A shielded medical device implanted in a biological organism. The device has a magnetic shield, and the magnetic shield contains a layer of nanomagnetic material; such layer has a morphological density of at least 98 percent; and it is bonded to the medical device by means of an interlayer with a thickness of less than about 10 microns. The nanomagnetic material in such layer has a saturation magnetization of from about 1 to about 36,000 Gauss, a coercive force of from about 0.01 to about 5,000 Oersteds, a relative magnetic permeability of from about 1 to about 500,000, and an average particle size of less than about 100 nanometers.

Magnetically shielded assembly

Removing noise from audio

The performance of a voice conference using a packet-based conference bridge can be improved with a number of modifications. In one modification, the conference bridge receives speech indication signals from the individual packet-based terminals within the voice conference, these speech indication signals then being used by the conference bridge to select the talkers within the voice conference. This removes the need for speech detection techniques within the conference bridge, hence decreasing the required processing power and the latency within the conference bridge. In another modification, the conference bridge sends addressing control signals to the individual packet-based terminals selected as talkers, these addressing control signals directing the terminals selected as talkers to directly transmit their voice data packets to the other terminals within the voice conference. This direct transmission of voice data packets can reduce transcoding and latency within the network. These two modifications could further be combined, resulting in a conference bridge that receives speech indication signals, selects the talkers for the voice conference and outputs addressing control signal to the talkers. In this case, the advantages of the two modifications are gained as well as additional capacity advantages resulting from no voice signals actually traversing the conference bridge.

Apparatus and method for packet-based media communications

Disclosed are an apparatus and method of deducing a user's intention using multimodal information. The user's intention deduction apparatus includes a first predictor to predict a part of a user's intention using at least one piece of motion information, and a second predictor to predict the user's intention using the predicted part of the user's intention and multimodal information received from at least one multimodal sensor.

Apparatus and method for predicting user's intention based on multimodal information

A system for programming one or more hearing aids with a host computer, the system including a hearing aid programmer for wireless communications with the host computer. In various embodiments, the hearing aid programmer has at least one interface connector for communication with at least one hearing aid. Additionally, in various embodiments, the system includes a wireless interface adapted for connecting to the at least one interface connector of the hearing aid programmer, the wireless interface further adapted for wireless communication with one or more hearing aids. Varying embodiments of the present subject matter include a wireless interface which contains signal processing electronics, a memory connected to the signal processing electronics; and a wireless module connected to the signal processing electronics and adapted for wireless communications.

Portable system for programming hearing aids

A speech compression system capable of encoding a speech signal into a bitstream for subsequent decoding to generate synthesized speech is disclosed. The speech compression system optimizes the bandwidth consumed by the bitstream by balancing the desired average bit rate with the perceptual quality of the reconstructed speech. The speech compression system comprises a full-rate codec, a half-rate codec, a quarter-rate codec and an eighth-rate codec. The codecs are selectively activated based on a rate selection. In addition, the full and half-rate codecs are selectively activated based on a type classification. Each codec is selectively activated to encode and decode the speech signals at different bit rates emphasizing different aspects of the speech signal to enhance overall quality of the synthesized speech.

System of encoding and decoding speech signals

There is provided a conference bridge or transcoder configured to intelligently handle multiple speech channels in the contest of a packet network, wherein various speech channels may adhere to variety of speech encoding standards. For example, the conference bridge establishes framing and alignment of multiple incoming speech channels associated with multiple participants, extracts parameters from the speech samples, mixes the parameters, and re-encodes the resulting speech samples for transmission to the participants. In one aspect, a speech processing method comprises decoding a first bitstream according to a first coding scheme to generate first speech samples and a first side information; generating second speech samples and a second side information using the first speech samples and the first side information, for use according to a second coding scheme; and creating a second bitstream, encoded based on the second coding scheme, using the second speech samples and the second side information.

Conference bridge processing of speech in a packet network environment

Codebook tables for encoding and decoding

Encoding and decoding speech signals variably based on signal classification

A method and apparatus for generating frame voicing decisions for an incoming speech signal having periods of active voice and non-active voice for a speech encoder in a speech communications system. A predetermined set of parameters is extracted from the incoming speech signal, including a pitch gain and a pitch lag. A frame voicing decision is made for each frame of the incoming speech signal according to values calculated from the extracted parameters. The predetermined set of parameters further includes a frame full band energy, and a set of spectral parameters called Line Spectral Frequencies (LSF).

Eyal Shlomot

Papers

System of encoding and decoding speech signals

Conference bridge processing of speech in a packet network environment

Codebook tables for encoding and decoding

Encoding and decoding speech signals variably based on signal classification

Method and apparatus for detecting voice activity in a speech signal