Abstract
Hundreds of thousands of profoundly hearing-impaired people perceive sounds through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve using a cochlear implant (CI). However, CI users are often poor at understanding speech in noisy environments and separating sounds that come from different locations. We provided missing speech and spatial hearing cues through haptic stimulation to augment the electrical CI signal. After just 30 min of training, we found this “electro-haptic” stimulation substantially improved speech recognition in multi-talker noise when the speech and noise came from different locations. Our haptic stimulus was delivered to the wrists at an intensity that can be produced by a compact, low-cost, wearable device. These findings represent a significant step towards the production of a non-invasive neuroprosthetic that can improve CI users’ ability to understand speech in realistic noisy environments.
Highlights
Hundreds of thousands of profoundly hearing-impaired people perceive sounds through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve using a cochlear implant (CI)
We use haptic stimulation to complement the electrical CI signal by providing missing or degraded speech and location information. We tested whether this “electro-haptic stimulation” (EHS)[6,7,8,9,10] can enhance speech-in-noise performance for CI users when speech and noise come from different locations
After just 15 min of training, EHS was found to allow CI users to locate sounds with similar accuracy to hearing-aid users. This improved ability to locate a single sound suggests that CI users may be able to more effectively separate multiple sounds coming from different locations, resulting in improved speech-in-noise performance
Summary
Hundreds of thousands of profoundly hearing-impaired people perceive sounds through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve using a cochlear implant (CI). Cochlear implants (CIs) are neuroprosthetic devices that enable profoundly hearing-impaired people to perceive sounds through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve They have been remarkably successful, allowing many users to achieve excellent speech recognition in quiet e nvironments[1]. We presented speech amplitude envelope cues, extracted from the signals that would be received by behind-the-ear hearing aids or CIs, and delivered them to each wrist through haptic stimulation. Our approach was designed to be readily transferrable to a real-world application, with the haptic signal processing performed in real-time and the signal presented at an intensity that could readily be produced by a compact, wearable neuroprosthetic device
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