Evaluation of tooth-conduction microphone for communication under noisy environment

We investigated a new communication-aid system focused on bone-conduction through a tooth, for listening to and recording voices. In this paper, we developed a tooth-conduction microphone (TCM) and evaluate the articulation of tooth-conducted voice (TCV). Because the TCM has the shape of one's dental mold, it is wearable like a mouthpiece. Moreover, it can extract tooth vibration during phonation as TCV. To evaluate articulation of TCV, we adopted monosyllable articulation for subjective assessment and linear predictive coding cepstral distance for objective assessment. The results of articulation show that TCV is not sufficiently clear compared to air-conducted. However, it is confirmed that TCV is robust to environmental noise because the accuracy rate is not decreased when the TCV is recorded under high ambient noise.