What is bone conduction? In what ways can bone conduction be used in life?

When it comes to bone conduction, it seems to be used for hearing aids. For deaf patients with non-neurological injuries, bone conduction hearing aids can help them hear sound.
Normally, we can hear sound in two different ways: eardrum or bone. Most sounds from the external environment, from annoying car horns to sweet bird calls, are transmitted to our ears through eardrums. The eardrum converts sound into vibration and transmits it to the cochlea. These vibrations resonate with different parts of the cochlea according to different audio frequencies. Then, the resonant motion is converted into nerve signals and transmitted to the brain, thus completing the seemingly “simple” listening process.

Your teacher may have told you that the most common sound we hear through bone conduction is our own voice. That’s true. Our voice will directly bypass the eardrum, pass through the mandible to the cochlea, and then resonate with the relevant parts according to the audio frequency, and finally become nerve signals in the brain. The sound transmitted through the eardrum is often slightly different from that transmitted through bone conduction. The best example is that your voice in the recording sounds very different from your usual voice when you speak. Bone conduction earphone with unique design and FM function.

Although your own voice may be the most commonly heard voice through bone conduction, bone conduction also has wider applications. Compared with the novel bone conduction headphones, bone conduction itself is not a new technology at all. In 1924, the patent application of the world’s first device for transmitting sound through bone conduction was made. Even the concept of bone conduction has played an important role in the history of music.

Ludwig van beethoven, a famous composer in 18th century, is famous for his deafness. We were all moved by his story of playing Moonlight for blind girls. However, Beethoven has another legendary thing, that is, using bone conduction to listen to his own music. He connected one end of a stick to the piano and bit the other end with his own teeth, so that the vibration of the piano would be transmitted to his ears through the jawbone.

Bone conduction technology has made great progress today. In the past five years, bone conduction has been applied in many fields, including military affairs, medicine and, of course, those fashionable bone conduction headphones.

Thanks to bone conduction, some commercial sunglasses can also double as music players. These devices have embedded small speakers in sunglasses, and they can transmit sound through bone conduction by placing them near the jaw.

One of the most significant applications of bone conduction technology is that we mentioned earlier to help deaf people recover their hearing. Some companies have invented a special kind of hearing aid called Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (BAHA). They include two parts: an external processor and a fixing device implanted into the bone near the inner ear by surgery. The processor is used to capture the sound and manually transmit it to the internal device, which makes the inner ear vibrate so that people can hear it.