Speech Intelligibility in Noise With a Single-Unit Cochlear Implant Audio Processor

Abstract

The study indicates that CI users with the receiver/stimulator implanted in positions further behind the ear are expected to have higher difficulties in noisy situations when wearing the single-unit audio processor.

Clinical outcomes with the Kanso™ off-the-ear cochlear implant sound processor

“…Recently, an off-the-ear (OTE) sound processor for CIs was introduced which integrates the coil, processor and microphones into a single unit worn over the implant site (Mertens et al, 2015;Wimmer et al, 2015). This sound processor placement is very similar to the posterior auricular placement of bone conduction implants.…”

“…This is probably because the subjects were tested with the non-test ear un-occluded, meaning advantage provided by their normal-hearing ear would easily obscure any subtle differences that may have existed between the processors. Wimmer et al (2015) tested unilateral hearing performance with these same processors, but in subjects with profound bilateral hearing loss. In this study they found significantly poorer hearing performance with the OTE compared to the BTE sound processor when tested using a speech signal from the front and competing noise from the rear.…”

“…Physical and numerical modelling by the authors confirmed that the degree of observed differences in SNR between the processors was consistent with their expectations based on the differences in calculated head shadow and pinna effects resulting from the different microphone locations. The authors suggested that future studies should investigate the use of directional microphone technologies in OTE devices (Wimmer et al, 2015).…”

Assessment of the Speech Intelligibility Performance of Post Lingual Cochlear Implant Users at Different Signal-to-Noise Ratios Using the Turkish Matrix Test

“…Wimmer et al (13) measured the speech intelligibility in noise performance of experienced CI users in 4 spatial configuration with the Oldenburg sentence test. They compared the SRT performance between Rondo and Opus 2 system and found no statistically significant differences in the situations in which the signal came from the front and noise came from the frontal, ipsilateral and contralateral sides.…”

Reply to Wimmer et al.’s comments concerning: ‘off the ear with no loss in speech understanding: comparing the RONDO and the OPUS 2 cochlear implant audio processors’

“…Wimmer et al's article "Speech intelligibility in noise with a single-unit cochlear implant audio processor" [2] found that speech understanding in noise with the RONDO was only significantly worse than with the OPUS 2 when speech was presented from the front and noise from the back (the S 0 N 180 setting)-not when speech was presented from the front (S 0 N 0 ) of the sides (S 0 N IL and S 0 N CL ). Considering that our article did not specify the test setup we used for speech understanding in noise testing, it was inaccurate to assert that Wimmer et al's findings contradicted our own or those of Mertens et al [3] and Távora-Vieira and Miller [4] without considering test setup.…”