AsianScientist (Jul. 9, 2019) – In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers have developed a flexible and wearable vibration sensor that can be used to precisely recognize speech.
Mobile founds now typically come equipped with a voice recognition feature that uses a microphone to detect differences in sound pressure. However, this method is easily affected by background noise and damping effects, and is therefore unsuitable for high security uses of voice recognition such as in banking authentication.
In the present study, a team led by Professors Cho Kilwon and Chung Yoonyoung of POSTECH has successfully developed a sensor that can precisely recognize voice through vibration of the neck skin and is not affected by ambient noise or the volume of sound.
Firstly, the researchers demonstrated that the voice pressure is proportional to the acceleration of neck skin vibration at various sound pressure levels from 40 to 70 dBSP. They then developed a vibration sensor that can sense voices quantitively by measuring the acceleration of skin vibration, using an ultrathin polymer film and a diaphragm with tiny holes.
The researchers also successfully demonstrated that the device can accurately recognize voice without vibrational distortion even in the noisy environment and at a very low voice volume with a mouth mask worn.
This research can be further extended to various voice-recognition applications such as an electronic skin, human-machine interface, wearable vocal healthcare monitoring device, the researchers said.
“This research is very meaningful in a way that it developed a new voice-recognition system which can quantitively sense and analyze voice and is not affected by the surroundings. It took a step forward from the conventional voice-recognition system that could only recognize voice qualitatively,” Cho added.
The article can be found at: Lee et al. (2019) An Ultrathin Conformable Vibration-responsive Electronic Skin for Quantitative Vocal Recognition.
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Source: Pohang University of Science & Technology; Photo: Pixabay.
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