Issues in the development of multichannel tactile devices for hearing- impaired children and adults

Abstract

We have discussed the influence of a number of individual factors in the successful use of tactile devices. Tactile devices, such as the Tickle Talker, have been primarily developed to provide additional speech information to be used in combination with speechreading, and in some cases aided residual hearing, addressing the particular individual's speech perception and communication needs. Evaluations have shown that enhancement of speech feature discrimination with the device may occur immediately on fitting, but effective integration of tactually encoded speech feature cues into combined-modality speech perception requires a minimum of 6 months habilitation. Tactile-alone perception of wor..