Abstract
ObjectiveTo investigate the performance of monaural and binaural beamforming technology with an additional noise reduction algorithm, in cochlear implant recipients.MethodThis experimental study was conducted as a single subject repeated measures design within a large German cochlear implant centre. Twelve experienced users of an Advanced Bionics HiRes90K or CII implant with a Harmony speech processor were enrolled. The cochlear implant processor of each subject was connected to one of two bilaterally placed state-of-the-art hearing aids (Phonak Ambra) providing three alternative directional processing options: an omnidirectional setting, an adaptive monaural beamformer, and a binaural beamformer. A further noise reduction algorithm (ClearVoice) was applied to the signal on the cochlear implant processor itself. The speech signal was presented from 0° and speech shaped noise presented from loudspeakers placed at ±70°, ±135° and 180°. The Oldenburg sentence test was used to determine the signal-to-noise ratio at which subjects scored 50% correct.ResultsBoth the adaptive and binaural beamformer were significantly better than the omnidirectional condition (5.3 dB±1.2 dB and 7.1 dB±1.6 dB (p<0.001) respectively). The best score was achieved with the binaural beamformer in combination with the ClearVoice noise reduction algorithm, with a significant improvement in SRT of 7.9 dB±2.4 dB (p<0.001) over the omnidirectional alone condition.ConclusionsThe study showed that the binaural beamformer implemented in the Phonak Ambra hearing aid could be used in conjunction with a Harmony speech processor to produce substantial average improvements in SRT of 7.1 dB. The monaural, adaptive beamformer provided an averaged SRT improvement of 5.3 dB.
Highlights
The performance of cochlear implant users continues to improve and many achieve good levels of speech perception, especially in quiet
The best score was achieved with the binaural beamformer in combination with the ClearVoice noise reduction algorithm, with a significant improvement in SRT of 7.9 dB62.4 dB (p, 0.001) over the omnidirectional alone condition
The study showed that the binaural beamformer implemented in the Phonak Ambra hearing aid could be used in conjunction with a Harmony speech processor to produce substantial average improvements in SRT of 7.1 dB
Summary
The performance of cochlear implant users continues to improve and many achieve good levels of speech perception, especially in quiet. Cochlear implant manufacturers have used a number of different algorithms to reduce noise in the processing pathway such as Adaptive Dynamic Range Optimisation, used in recent versions of the Cochlear device [5] or ClearVoice, used in recent versions of the Advanced Bionics device [6]. Both these algorithms operate internally on a single-channel audio signal. Despite being a standard feature in hearing aids for over a decade, the first beamforming algorithms for cochlear implant processors were commercially introduced in 2005 for users of the Cochlear Freedom sound processor [7,8,9]
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