Mechanical engineering professors and Ph.D. candidates at Binghamton University are looking to improve sensor technology, which is essential to billions of devices in use today. With a three-year $359,958 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers will seek to apply these new sensor technologies to hearing aids.

In creating new, highly sensitive microphones for hearing aids, the researchers utilized a sensor technology known as capacitive sensing. Capacitive sensing is different from other methods of “sensing,” or capturing information from the environment, in that it measures an object’s distance by analyzing the effect the object has on an electrical field created by the sensor. Devices that use this type of sensing include accelerometers, gyroscopes, touch screens, proximity sensors and microphones.

Ronald Miles, a co-principal investigator on the project and chair of the department of mechanical engineering in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, attributed the department’s innovative work in sensing technology to his own research findings, in addition to the work of Sherry Towfighian, co-principal investigator on the project and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at BU. He said that the combined effort of different specialties across the mechanical engineering department resulted in technological progress which may lead to increased capabilities of all capacitive sensing devices.

“My own work in this field began with my discovery of a new way for small animals like insects to tell where sound came from,” Miles wrote in an email. “I then developed microphones based on that discovery. When Towfighian arrived, she had worked on a way to make actuators that can push things using capacitance. This project is the result of taking her work and mine and combining them to do something really new: ‘repulsive sensors.’ This can solve a big problem that plagues all capacitive sensing devices, not just microphones.“

Towfighian explains that the NSF grant has allowed her and her team to experiment with repulsive sensors, particularly within her discipline of micro-electro-mechanical systems [MEMS].

“We address a severe limitation in capacitive sensing mechanism that causes sensor failure and limited operation range,” Towfighian wrote in an email. “Employing this concept in a MEMS microphone, an essential part of hearing aids, we expect significant improvements in terms of sound sensitivity and directionality.”

Towfighian said her favorite part of working on this research is the impact that it can have on the lives of everyday people, including millions of hearing aid users.

“My expertise is in MEMS sensors and is complementary to Miles’s expertise on MEMS microphones used in hearing aids,” Towfighian wrote. “With combined expertise, we aim to improve the quality of lives for hearing impaired. I find it rewarding to use my engineering knowledge to help people live better. This motivation helps me work harder every day and makes my life meaningful.”

Like Towfighian, Mehmet Ozdogan, a third-year Ph.D. candidate participating in the research, said he finds meaning in his work by seeing it become a useful product for others.

“There are millions of people having used hearing aids around the world and they should feel comfortable using their life-saving gadgets,” Ozdogan said. “As a research group of mechanical engineering department at Watson School of Engineering, we believe that designing high-quality hearing aids will improve the quality of their lives.”