Abstract: The present invention relates to a hearing instrument which comprises: (a) a housing; (b) an RF receiver; (c) plurality of conductive elements, each conductive element has the form of a plate, is positioned on said housing so it provides coupling with the device wearer's skin while the instrument is in use, thereby forming an antenna element together with the wearer's body; (d) a switch for each conductive element, for connecting or disconnecting the respective antenna element from the receiver; (e) a controller for periodically initiating a testing cycle wherein during said cycle: (e.1) the controller sequentially scans said switches by closing each time another switch, thereby to connect each time a respective antenna element to said receiver; (e.

Abstract: The invention relates to a switched low-energy consumption amplifier for a piezoelectric element, which comprises: (a) an inductor, which together with the capacitance of said piezoelectric element forms an LC circuit; (b) a battery connected to said LC circuit; (c) a set of controlled switches capable of connecting and disconnecting circuit components at a rate which is significantly higher than the frequency of an input signal to said circuit; (d) a comparator for receiving an input signal, comparing a present voltage value of the input signal with a present voltage value over said piezoelectric element or a part, thereof, and conveying an indication regarding said comparison to a switching control unit; and (e) a switching control unit for receiving said indication from said comparator, and determining repeatedly every period P, which is significantly shorter than the period of the highest frequency included within said input signal, whether the piezoelectric element should be charged or discharged, and ac

Abstract: An electronic seal including an electronic tag, an electrically resistive element in electrical communication with and attached to the tag, the resistive element being bondable to an object so as to define an electrical resistance, wherein a change in bonding of the element to the object causes a change in the electrical resistance, the change in electrical resistance being communicated to the tag.

Abstract: An FM receiver includes an FM discriminator having a comparator for converting the FM signal to a series of discrete square-wave pulses all of the same amplitude and of a repetition rate varying with the frequency of the FM signals; and an integrator circuit which integrates the series of monopolar square-wave pulses to produce an output signal having an amplitude varying with the repetition rate of the square-wave pulses. Also described are FM stero systems including the above FM discriminator in its audio channels.

Abstract: The described hearing aid includes a frequency analyzer for classifying incoming sounds according to their frequency, and for selecting an appropriate transposition factor (the ratio of the information storage rate to the information retrieval rate) according to the appropriate one of several transposition factors inputted into the hearing aid based on the particular user's hearing characteristics for different frequencies. Also, described is an arrangement for minimizing loss of speech components containing the same frequency information by recirculating such speech components. Further described is an arrangement for reconstructing portions of the speech components according to their classification by the frequency analyzer in order to minimize loss of useful information in the output signal.