Objective measurement of speech intelligibility with cochlear implants

A growing number of people with profound hearing loss benefit these days from a cochlear implant (CI). It allows them to (re)gain access to sound through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Today, the benefit of a CI is evaluated by asking the CI user to recall words or sentences, which is not always optimal. The required active participation of the listener can make these measurements challenging or even impossible, e.g., in young children or persons with mental disabilities. In addition, recalling words or sentences not only evaluates the function of the CI but also, for example, speech production and working memory. Third, the speech material is limited to lists of standardized words and sentences which are not representative of daily life speech. In addition, the number of lists per speech material is limited, resulting in undesired learning effects. To overcome these challenges, we want to develop an objective measure of speech understanding for more realistic stimuli where no active participation is required. During this PhD thesis, we (1) optimized and validated different characteristics of the speech stimulus for predicting speech understanding from measures of neural speech tracking and (2) we showed the feasibility of neural speech tracking as an objective measure of speech understanding in CI users.

Publication year:2022

Accessibility:Open