Objective assessment of electrode discrimination with the auditory change complex in adult cochlear implant users.

The spatial auditory change complex (ACC) is a cortical response elicited by a change in place of stimulation. There is growing evidence that it provides a useful objective measure of electrode discrimination in cochlear implant (CI) users. To date, the spatial ACC has only been measured in relatively experienced CI users with one type of device.

Developing an assessment approach for perceptual changes to tinnitus sound characteristics for adult cochlear implant recipients.

Objective: To investigate the impact of cochlear implantation on tinnitus suppression, characteristics, localization, and duration.

Design: A cochlear implant (CI) recipient-focused postal questionnaire survey.

Study Sample: The questionnaire was posted, with consent, to 100 adults who had received a unilateral CI at the RNTNEH between 1988 and 1999.

Clinical use of electrode differentiation to enhance programming of cochlear implants.

The effect of deactivating indiscriminable cochlear implant (CI) electrodes for unilaterally implanted adults was evaluated using the BKB (Bamford-Kowal-Bench) sentence test in quiet and in pink noise (signal-to-noise ratio of +10dBA) and the adaptive Coordinate Response Measure (CRM). Each CI recipient who failed electrode differentiation (ED) in at least one electrode-pair, based on results of a pure-tone pitch-ranking task received two research programmes to try out in a cross-over study. Research programmes (RP) either employed discriminable electrodes only or the most discriminable two-thirds of the electrodes in the electrode array for CI recipients failing ED for more than a third of the electrodes.

Benefits of the HiRes 120 coding strategy combined with the Harmony processor in an adult European multicentre study.

Conclusion: The Harmony processor was found to be reliable, comfortable and offered a substantially increased battery life compared with the previous generation processor. No significant improvement in speech understanding with HiRes was demonstrated from objective measures, but the majority of subjects showed a clear subjective preference for the combination HiRes 120/Harmony processor.

Objectives: To evaluate experience with the Harmony™ sound processor, together with the HiRes 120 strategy.