Professor Ren Tianling of Tsinghua University: Graphene artificial throat can make deaf-mute people "speak"

Graphene can be transformed into a “sound tube” to help deaf people “speak”. The "smart graphene artificial throat" invented by Professor Tian Ling, a research group of Tsinghua University Microelectronics, is expected to solve the "speaking" problem of deaf people in the future.

Recently, Ren Tianling's research group published a research paper entitled "Intelligent Graphene Artificial Throat with Sound Sensing Ability" in "Nature News". Using the advantages of porous graphene materials, it has created a kind of transceiver-like, wearable integration. Acoustic device.

According to reports, this integrated acoustic device uses the thermoacoustic effect of graphene to emit sound, and uses the piezoresistive effect of graphene to receive sound, realizing the sound transceiving of a single device. The porous graphene material used in the device has high thermal conductivity and low heat capacity, and can emit a wide spectrum sound of 100 Hz to 40 kHz through the thermoacoustic effect. Its porous structure is also extremely sensitive to pressure, and it can sense the weak vibration of the throat at the time of sounding, and can receive sound signals through the piezoresistive effect. Therefore, the device can accurately detect deaf-mute people's low-pitched, screaming and other special sounds, and convert this "meaningless sound" into a frequency- and intensity-controllable sound, which is expected to be converted into a pre-recorded language in the future.

When the “artificial throat” wearer makes a low-pitched voice, the artificial throat will sense the vibration state of the throat and emit a preset sound. When the wearer changes the length and tone of the low-pitched voice, the sound of the artificial throat will also correspond. Significant changes have occurred.

According to Tao Qiqi, a doctoral student of the Micro-Nano Electronics Department of Tsinghua University, who participated in the innovation, before the "decoding", the deaf-mute people need to arrange the low-pitched and screaming sounds of different intensities and frequencies according to their own vocal characteristics. Form the "language code" of deaf people.

“Every deaf-mute speaker after 'encoding' is like a letter key on the keyboard. It only needs to use different arrangement and combination to express the continuous and complete semantics of deaf people. This makes us ordinary people can't understand. The deaf-mute voice is converted into a normal language and can be expressed continuously," Tao said.

In addition to distinguishing different tones, the intelligent graphene artificial throat can “decode” different types of deaf-mute “language” according to sound vibration, screaming, coughing, etc., and at the same time realize the arrangement of syllables and tones. Let the deaf and dumb speak a richer sentence.

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