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Cochlear II - Improving the perception of speech and music in cochlear implants

From 01-01-2006 to 31-05-2008

Description

A Cochlear Implant (CI) is a device that enables profoundly deaf people to perceive sounds by electrically stimulating the auditory nerves in the cochlea using an implanted electrode array. During the last years, the performance of these devices has considerably improved such that most recipients are able to understand speech, at least in quiet environments. However, in noisy environments (e.g. cocktail party situation, traffic) and in difficult listening situations (e.g. interfering talkers), CI-users still experience large problems to understand speech. In addition, even in quiet environments the music perception of CI-users is severely degraded. The degraded perception of speech and music is partly caused by the fact that current CI sound processing schemes limit the perception of pitch and deteriorate the capability to localize sound sources, compared to normal hearing persons. Hence, speech understanding in noise can be improved by improving the pitch perception and spatial hearing of cochlear implantees and/or by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the incoming sound signal using noise reduction techniques. In addition, a better pitch perception results in an improved music perception and an increased ability to understand tonal languages and to perceive supra-segmental sentence information (e.g. intonation, speaker emotion), even in quiet environments. The innovation goal is to develop new concepts for this, and implement these in algorithms and speech processing software which will be introduced into the cochlear implant system, so that a significant improvement in hearing performance can be made available to new and existing CI recipients.