After 25 years in business Audiological Engineering has closed. Unfortunately we were unable to find anyone to carry on making tactile aids available. Although we, David and Loretta Franklin, have enjoyed our years in business, we are excited to begin new things. We would like to thank the people at NIH NIDCD and researchers who have helped us so much over the years.

Audiological Engineering Corporation (AEC) was founded in 1982 by David Franklin and Loretta Franklin for the purpose of researching and developing practical aids for the deaf and hard of hearing, the primary focus being Tactile Aids. The tactile aid product line, TACTAID®, is used around the world by deaf children and adults.

Audiological Engineering Corporation is proud of its reputation for producing the highest quality tactile aids for the commercial market and for providing important, unique research in the tactile aid field. AEC provides advanced prototypes and technical support to leading audiological research facilities around the world. AEC continually incorporates the results of these independent studies into its own research programs to develop the most advanced and useful product possible.

Starting in 1982, with the aid of grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, AEC has produced a number of tactile aids as well as other devices related to hearing impairment.

In 1983, David Franklin developed TACTAID I, the first tactile aid small and practical enough to be useful in most daily situations. TACTAID I provided rhythmic and temporal (timing) information about sounds and was very useful for environmental sound awareness. It incorporated the company’s patented Automatic Noise Suppression system that has been employed in all TACTAID models. TACTAID I continues to be used successfully worldwide.

Three years later, Mr. Franklin developed Tactaid II, the first wearable two-channel tactile aid. Two channels provide additional frequency information about sounds and allowed greater speech recognition ability. Various speech sound differences (e.g., voiced vs. unvoiced consonants), became more apparent in the changing patterns of vibrations of the two channels. A few years later, Tactaid II+ further improved the user’s ability to distinguish noise from speech. A seven-channel device, Tactaid 7, followed. Used primarily as a speech training aid with children, it delivers a more complex signal and differentiates between sounds more clearly.

Tactilator was introduced in 1998, based on a method of tactually supplementing speechreading, called Tactiling. Invented by a Gustaf Söderlund, a deafened Swedish man who lost his hearing at the age of eight, Tactiling consists of placing a hand on a speaker’s shoulder with the thumb placed loosely against the side of the neck to sense vibrations; it produces exceptional speech cues. After studying the information presented through this method, Mr. Franklin designed the Tactilator to present the same cues available through Tactiling without requiring physical contact between the speaker and the receiver. This was done through a combination of the new processing scheme and new efficient wide-band vibrators. As in the earlier two-channel Tactaid II+, the incoming sound signal is divided into a high-frequency channel and a low-frequency channel. However, here the similarity ends. The Tactilator sends both spectral and temporal voicing cues to the low channel. Each of the two vibrators covers a different part of the sound spectrum. Our research and anecdotal data suggest that the real speech signal for the low frequencies (up to 1000 Hz), an absence of signals from the region 1000 Hz to approximately 4000 Hz, and then encoded signals from the region above 4000 Hz enable the user to obtain excellent unambiguous temporal and voicing information, and better high frequency consonant distinctions.

Our latest device, LTD, Little Tactile Device is a state-of-the-art instrument that improves the style and convenience of the Tactilator by significantly decreasing the size of the electronics package, replacing the custom NiCad battery packs with standard AAA batteries, and increasing efficiency to provide long battery life. Like the Tactilator, it converts sound information into patterns of vibrations that help most users to improve their understanding of the world of sound.