Smart Wristwatches Employing Finger-Conducted Voice Transmission System

Abstract

The principal aim of this paper is to present a novel speech transmission system that conveys speech between an actuator in a wearable wristwatch and the ear bone of a user through a finger. If an individual wears a smart watch equipped with an actuator that can play speech sent via communication lines, speech vibrations propagate from the actuator to fingertips through the human tissue and bone. When an individual places his or her finger into their ear, speech conducted through the finger can be registered and heard. While listening to finger-conducted speech, sounds are muffled, significantly degrading the intelligibility of speech. To mitigate this problem, a formant enhancement filter is applied to the speech prior to being fed into the actuator. With this method, the impulse response of human tissue and bones between the fingertips and wrist on which the watch is worn is first estimated to account for speaker-dependent distortion. Based on the estimated impulse response, a gain filter is used to boost the sound spectra, especially within the formant regions, to compensate for frequency distortion prior to speech transmission. On the other hand, since the impulse responses of humans are quite different for each individual, we propose the novel idea of a personalized algorithm that guides users to select an appropriate gain filter, using the k-medoids clustering algorithm. Also, when an individual uses the proposed system, speech quality is degraded due to the ambient noise and acoustic echo between the microphone and actuator in the watch. Thus, to reduce background noise and acoustic echo, an integrated acoustic echo and background noise suppression algorithm is employed. Extensive simulations of the proposed system were performed by creating a novel phantom, which mimics the human hand with an aid of an ear simulator. We demonstrate that the proposed system has improved speech quality, when transmitting speech from the wearable wristwatch to a human perceptual organ through the finger.