Piezoelectric Nanowire

About

Background: One out of ten people suffers from hearing loss worldwide, constructively and sensorineurally. People are affected by this in a way from mild impairment to profound deafness, both for children and adults. Nowadays, hearing aid devices offer people with hearing loss a significant way to improve the quality of their life. Typically, there are two categories of hearing loss, conductive hearing loss and sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). For a conductive hearing loss, sound is not properly transmitted through the ear due to some conductive loss. For this category of hearing losss, a simple amplifier device is all that is needed to restore normal hearing. However, only 5% of the people suffering hearing loss are in this category. The majority of hearing loss falls in the SNHL category. SNHL is normally caused by the damage to inner hair cells, outer hair cells, which then causes a cochlear malfunction. The typical device for addressing SNHL uses digital signal processing for preprocessing of the sound signals. However, these devices have drawbacks such as relatively large size, and high power consumption. This invention uses a mechanism which merges the miniature of nanowire structure and the piezoelectricity of ZnO. This devices mimics the mechanism of how a hair cell works, which potentially can be applied as an advanced category of hearing aid device option. In detail, this invention includes a vibration sensor, which includes a substrate. A first electrical contact and a spaced apart second electrical contact are both disposed on a first surface of the substrate. The elongated piezoelectric nano-scale structure extends outwardly from the first surface of the substrate and is disposed between, and in electrical communication with, the first electrical contact and the second electrical contact. The elongated piezoelectric nano-scale structure is oriented so that a voltage potential exists between the first electrical contact and the second electrical contact when the elongated piezoelectric nano-scale structure is bent from a first state to a second state.