Infrastructure

Section of the main lab space equipped with a laminar flow workbench for sensor assembly, maintenance, and fabrication. This area also contains a chemical wet bench, a lab oven, and a high-temperature oven. 

The workstation contains dedicated 3D micro-positioning stages, a surgical microscope, a 1D laser Doppler vibrometer, a setup for hydrophone calibration, and a high-end data acquisition system, all situated on a vibration-isolated table.

A general purpose experimentation room containing a dedicated 6-degrees of freedom industrial robot (+3D or scanning unit), 3D micro-positioning stages (synchronized with the industrial robot), a surgical microscope, a scanning and 3D laser Doppler vibrometer systems, 3D stereo camera setups with micro-meter precision, a variety of force sensors with milli- and micro-Newton precision, hydrophones, microphones, speakers, bone conduction transducers, and high-end data acquisition systems. All vibration sensitive equipment is situated on a vibration-isolated table. The room includes a dedicated sample preparation station for in-situ modifications of the samples.

Sample preparation room containing three sample preparation areas, with a variety of surgical tools, bone drilling equipment, two surgical microscopes, adjustable ventilation ducts, secured fridges and freezers for sample storage, artificial samples for training, monitor mirroring the views through the surgical microscopes. 

Two rodent surgery rooms with three fully equipped workspaces to perform animal experiments, allowing precise operations under anesthesia with isoflurane or alternatives. LASC provides support to the biomedical research community and ensures humane and high quality animal care. For more information, see https://www.lasc.uzh.ch/ 
 

The embedding in the Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, of the University Hospital Zurich enables intraoperative experimental research during various surgical procedures. The versatile equipment, including Eclipse, Bio-Logic, and dedicated soft- and hardware from all cochlear implant manufacturers, enables a wide range of electrophysiological investigations of hearing along the auditory pathway.

Six soundproof rooms and one electrically shielded audiological investigation room, equipped with a wide range of audiological measurement systems for performing (wideband) tympanometry, (electrically-evoked) brainstem audiometry, pure-tone and speech audiometry and recording otoacoustic emissions. 
 

Soundproof booth with a 3D loudspeaker setup consisting of 29 Meyer Sound MM4 Xp loudspeakers at three different elevations for investigating directional hearing and simulating realistic listening environments.