Tactile aids can offer a particularly cost-effective answer to the increasing demand for technical aids for the profoundly and totally deaf. This book covers the design of tactile aids - single and multichannel - and the ways in which they may benefit the hearing impaired.Authors from Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA have contributed chapters, and among the topics they cover are: fundamentals of vibrotactile and electrotactile perception, signal processing strategies, tactile coding (including synthetic Tadoma), choice of subjects and subject training, evaluation of tactile aids and comparison with cochlear implants, and communication for the deaf-blind.The book should provide a useful reference for those who work with the profoundly deaf, students and others with interests in the perception of speech and environmental sound.