A novel portable instrument for long-term recording of fetal heart rate has been developed, based on the detection and evaluation of maternal abdominal acoustic signals. Multichannel, adaptive digital filtering using different frequency characteristics yields a reliable indication of fetal heart beats even at a high level of noise. The evaluation system statistically processes the acoustic signals, controls amplitude limits, and adjusts filter characteristics. Heart-rate variations of as much as 25/min/sec have been accurately registered. High-level integration enables the realization of the method in a very small, belt-mounted instrument with low power consumption, thus convenient for home use. The more than 40 hours of recorded detections stored in the built-in flash memory can be read back into a personal computer for medical inspection and analysis.
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Nano Lett
January 2025
Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Departamento de Física, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Nanostructured high-index dielectrics have shown great promise as low-loss photonic platforms for wavefront control and enhancing optical nonlinearities. However, their potential as optomechanical resonators has remained unexplored. In this work, we investigate the generation and detection of coherent acoustic phonons in individual crystalline gallium phosphide nanodisks on silica in a pump-probe configuration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDev Sci
March 2025
Department of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Contagious crying in infants has been considered an early marker of their sensitivity to others' emotions, a form of emotional contagion, and an early basis for empathy. However, it remains unclear whether infant distress in response to peer distress is due to the emotional content of crying or acoustically aversive properties of crying. Additionally, research remains severely biased towards samples from Europe and North America.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Neurosci
January 2025
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742
When we listen to speech, our brain's neurophysiological responses "track" its acoustic features, but it is less well understood how these auditory responses are enhanced by linguistic content. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses while subjects of both sexes listened to four types of continuous-speech-like passages: speech-envelope modulated noise, English-like non-words, scrambled words, and a narrative passage. Temporal response function (TRF) analysis provides strong neural evidence for the emergent features of speech processing in cortex, from acoustics to higher-level linguistics, as incremental steps in neural speech processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMJ Open
December 2024
National Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Introduction: Individuals with hearing loss and hearing aid users report higher levels of listening effort and fatigue in daily life compared with those with normal hearing. However, there is a lack of objective measures to evaluate these experiences in real-world settings. Recent studies have found that higher sound pressure levels (SPL) and lower signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) are linked to increased heart rate and decreased heart rate variability, reflecting the greater effort required to process auditory information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnn N Y Acad Sci
January 2025
Hainan Institute, Zhejiang University, Sanya, China.
In this paper, we introduce FUSION-ANN, a novel artificial neural network (ANN) designed for acoustic emission (AE) signal classification. FUSION-ANN comprises four distinct ANN branches, each housing an independent multilayer perceptron. We extract denoised features of speech recognition such as linear predictive coding, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient, and gammatone cepstral coefficient to represent AE signals.
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