HEARing CRC Supervisor: Richard vanHoesel

HEARing CRC Project: R2.2.2

Title:  Signal segregation in bilateral cochlear implant users.

Details:

Advances in cochlear implant (CI) technology over the past few decades have meant that CI
users are able to regain more and more of the hearing lost due to severe/profound sensorineural
deafness. Today the majority of CI recipients are able to achieve reasonably good speech
understanding in quiet listening conditions however performance in the presence of background
noise often remains challenging. Everyday situations, such as conversing with a friend in a
moderately busy café for example, can be difficult as the surrounding noise becomes muddled
together with the speech.

Listeners with unimpaired hearing can generally untangle different sounds in a listening
environment by utilizing specific features of each sound to distinguish them from one another.
The location in space from which sounds originate provides one such (useful) feature, which
can be detected much more easily by using two ears. However limitations in current implant and
sound processing designs reduce the ability of CI users to perceptually partition a sound mixture,
even with the use of bilateral devices.

This project aims to explore the ability of bilateral CI users to separate concurrent sounds,
and identify ways to improve that ability. The results from the study may lead to new sound
processing strategies or implant designs that ultimately improve speech understanding and the
ability to attend different sounds in noisy environments.