The Development of Remote Speech Recognition Tests for Adult Cochlear Implant Users: The Effect of Presentation Mode of the Noise and a Reliable Method to Deliver Sound in Home Environments.

The number of cochlear implant (CI) users is increasing annually, resulting in an increase in the workload of implant centers in ongoing patient management and evaluation. Remote testing of speech recognition could be time-saving for both the implant centers as well as the patient. This study addresses two methodological challenges we encountered in the development of a remote speech recognition tool for adult CI users.

Understanding the effect of noise on electrical stimulation sequences in cochlear implants and its impact on speech intelligibility.

The present study investigates the most important factors that limit the intelligibility of the cochlear implant (CI) processed speech in noisy environments. The electrical stimulation sequences provided in CIs are affected by the noise in the following three manners. First of all, the natural gaps in the speech are filled, which distorts the low-frequency ON/OFF modulations of the speech signal.

Speech understanding performance of cochlear implant subjects using time-frequency masking-based noise reduction.

Cochlear implant (CI) recipients report severe degradation of speech understanding under noisy conditions. Most CI recipients typically can require about 10-25 dB higher signal-to-noise ratio than normal hearing (NH) listeners in order to achieve similar speech understanding performance. In recent years, significant emphasis has been put on binaural algorithms, which not only make use of the head shadow effect, but also have two or more microphone signals at their disposal to generate binaural inputs.