Bone Conduction Pickup Based on Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers

This paper reports a novel bone conduction pickup approach based on piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs) as the sound pickup element. The PMUT array is die-attached on an amplification circuit and encapsulated with acoustically transparent adhesive. The packaged PMUT array is attached on the throat of a human body to pick up the sound signals. Compared with the classical air conduction approach, the reported bone conduction pickup method demonstrates a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of two times in noisy (with noise level of around 45 dB) and 5 times in very noisy ( with noise level of around 65 dB) environments, respectively. This work explores a new application for PMUTs in the field of bone conduction pickups.