The UT-Dallas Costakis Cochlear Implant Mobile (CCi-MOBILE) research platform enables experimental research with hearing-aid (HA) and cochlear-implant (CI) devices. The platform substitutes the clinical sound processor (CI/HA) with an Android smartphone/tablet or a PC as a computing hardware to run custom speech processing algorithms. The flexibility offered by such a setup enables researchers to provide custom-designed electric and acoustic stimuli (EAS) to CIs and HAs bilaterally in a time-synchronized manner. With this bimodal (electric + acoustic) capability, the platform can be used to undertake studies with individuals who either use a CI in one ear and a HA in the contralateral ear, or use hybrid implants in one or both ears. The CCi-MOBILE software suite includes a range of research applications which address different experimental needs. In the present work, a real-time VOCODER is incorporated in the CCi-MOBILE platform to facilitate research involving acoustic simulations of CIs. Two traditional flavors of VOCODER processing are implemented, namely noise-band and sine-wave vocoding. Flexibility is provided to modify processing parameters such as number of channels, frequency band-widths, filter attributes, etc. This flexibility combined with the ability to conduct long-term studies beyond the laboratory in diverse naturalistic acoustic environments will help advance research in psychoacoustics.

Cochlear implants (CIs) and hearing aids (HAs) are advanced assistive hearing devices that perform sound processing to achieve acoustic to acoustic/electrical stimulation, thus enabling the prospects for hearing restoration and rehabilitation. Since commercial CIs/HAs are typically constrained by manufacturer design/production constraints, it is necessary for researchers to use research platforms (RPs) to advance algorithms and conduct investigational studies with CI/HA subjects. While previous CI/HA research platforms exist, no study has explored establishing a formal evaluation protocol for the operational safety and reliability of RPs. This study proposes a two-phase analysis and evaluation paradigm for RPs. In the acoustic phase 1 step, a signal processing acoustic space is explored in order to present a sampled set of audio input content to explore the safety of the resulting output electric/acoustic stimulation. In the parameter phase 2 step, the configurable space for realizable electrical stimulation pulses is determined, and overall stimulation reliability and safety are evaluated. The proposed protocol is applied and demonstrated using Costakis Cochlear Implant Mobile. Assessment protocol observations, results, and additional best practices for subsampling of the acoustic and parameter test spaces are discussed. The proposed analysis-evaluation protocol establishes a viable framework for assessing RP operational safety and reliability. Guidelines for adapting the proposed protocol to address variability in RP configuration due to experimental factors such as custom algorithms, stimulation techniques, and/or individualization are also considered.

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