Bionic Voice Revolution

 

Following an exciting development by our Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience team in the field of bionics, MARCS Institute researchers have made a landmark discovery that will revolutionise the gold standard of care for laryngectomy patients. Bionic Voice is an electronic prosthesis for patients who lose their larynx due to cancer. It functions as an artificial larynx for these patients to restore their missing voice. Bionics is the science of replacing an amputated limb of the body with an electronic prosthesis.

Latest News And Events

Dementia patients’ lives being transformed through music
A new pilot program has been developed to help transform the lives of patient's in aged care. Neuroscience research has identified music as one of the few activities that stimulates and uses the entire brain.
New research suggests it's all about the bass
Dancing or tapping our feet to the beat of the drum - why do we do it?
Click Languages, Uniquely African ... and Australian!
What do Nelson Mandela and the Black Panther King of Wakanda have in common?
Bionic Voice Revolutionises the Gold Standard of Care
Imagine life without a voice. Around 300,000 people world-wide have had their larynx surgically removed as a result of cancer treatment, and the number is increasing by 10,000 every year.
Women; they just don't trust robots
Women are less likely to trust robots who stare at them.Research by Dr Chris Stanton, a roboticist at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, (Western Sydney University) investigated if the same physical elements that made humans trust one another could be applied to robotics.
AusE Babies trump peers at word learning
New research has found that Australian babies fare better than babies of other English speaking countries at word learning.
        
The Conversation: We all need to forget, even robots

17 August 2017

We all know what it’s like to forget something. A loved one’s birthday. A childhood memory. Even people capable of extraordinary memory feats – say, memorising the order of a deck of cards in less than 20 seconds – will still forget where they left their keys. People, it seems, are never in complete control of their memories.

Forgetting is a tricky business, both for humans and for artificial intelligence (AI), and researchers are exploring the idea of robot memory in many different ways.

Featured Publications

Speech tones
What can lexical tone training studies in adults tell us about tone processing in children?
Studies on the acquisition of lexical tone by adult learners have revealed that language background, musical experience, cognitive abilities and neuroanatomy all play a role in determining effective tone learning success. However, it is not clear whether similar individual differences play an analogous role in tone learning in childhood. Read more...
Justus von Leibig
Breaking Liebig’s Law: An Advanced Multipurpose Neuromorphic Engine
We present a massively-parallel scalable multi-purpose neuromorphic engine. All existing neuromorphic hardware systems suffer from Liebig's law (that the performance of the system is limited by the component in shortest supply) as they have fixed numbers of dedicated neurons and synapses for specific types of plasticity.To overcome this problem, our engine adopts a unique novel architecture. Read more...