Benefits from a mobile telephone adapter in Combi40+ cochlear implant users

Abstract

Conclusions. Telephone adapters can help cochlear implanted patients to enhance their telephonic conversations. However, these devices should be further developed to be useful for daily life. Objectives. To test a mobile telephone adapter to improve speech discrimination by mobile telephone in Combi40+ users. To evaluate the influence of the mobile telephone in communication. Subjects and methods. Seventeen Combi40+ implantees were tested with bisyllabic words presented through mobile telephones with and without a telephone adapter in quiet and noisy environments. Speech audiometries in open field were obtained for every patient. Results. Mean speech discrimination without the adapter in a quiet environment was 51.2%. In a noisy environment, mean discrimination increased significantly with the adapter from 30.3% to 42.9%. No statistically significant difference was found between speech discrimination in the quiet environment without the adapter and speech discrimination in the noisy environment with the adapter. When comparing speech discrimination in open field without lip-reading with equivalent telephonic conditions a statistically significant difference was found in favour of the open field.