Abstract
Cochlear implants (CIs) have enabled hundreds of thousands of profoundly hearing-impaired people to perceive sounds by electrically stimulating the auditory nerve. However, CI users are often very poor at locating sounds, which leads to impaired sound segregation and threat detection. We provided missing spatial hearing cues through haptic stimulation to augment the electrical CI signal. We found that this “electro-haptic” stimulation dramatically improved sound localisation. Furthermore, participants were able to effectively integrate spatial information transmitted through these two senses, performing better with combined audio and haptic stimulation than with either alone. Our haptic signal was presented to the wrists and could readily be delivered by a low-cost wearable device. This approach could provide a non-invasive means of improving outcomes for the vast majority of CI users who have only one implant, without the expense and risk of a second implantation.
Highlights
Cochlear implants (CIs) are neural prostheses that enable profoundly hearing-impaired people to perceive sounds through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve
We found that the root-mean-square (RMS) error was significantly lower in the Audio-haptic condition compared to the Audio-only condition both before training (t(11) = 5.9, p < 0.001, d = 1.69) and after training (t(11) = 4.3, p = 0.005, d = 1.24; www.nature.com/scientificreports all t-test p-values are corrected for multiple comparisons [see Methods])
The vast majority of CI users are implanted in only one ear and are very poor at locating sounds
Summary
Cochlear implants (CIs) are neural prostheses that enable profoundly hearing-impaired people to perceive sounds through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. This research suggests that haptic stimulation may be able to augment the limited electrical signal from the implant to enhance CI spatial hearing. We investigated whether CI users’ ability to locate speech can be improved by augmenting the electrical signal provided by the implant with a haptic signal (electro-haptic stimulation[17]). We derived this haptic signal from the audio that would be received by CI or hearing aid microphones behind each ear. It was anticipated that multisensory integration of the audio and haptic cues would occur, resulting in more accurate sound localisation in the Audio-haptic condition than in the Haptic-only condition
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