Abstract
The cochlear implant (CI) is the most widely used neuroprosthesis, recovering hearing for more than half a million severely-to-profoundly hearing-impaired people. However, CIs still have significant limitations, with users having severely impaired pitch perception. Pitch is critical to speech understanding (particularly in noise), to separating different sounds in complex acoustic environments, and to music enjoyment. In recent decades, researchers have attempted to overcome shortcomings in CIs by improving implant technology and surgical techniques, but with limited success. In the current study, we take a new approach of providing missing pitch information through haptic stimulation on the forearm, using our new mosaicOne_B device. The mosaicOne_B extracts pitch information in real-time and presents it via 12 motors that are arranged in ascending pitch along the forearm, with each motor representing a different pitch. In normal-hearing subjects listening to CI simulated audio, we showed that participants were able to discriminate pitch differences at a similar performance level to that achieved by normal-hearing listeners. Furthermore, the device was shown to be highly robust to background noise. This enhanced pitch discrimination has the potential to significantly improve music perception, speech recognition, and speech prosody perception in CI users.
Highlights
Cochlear implants (CIs) are neuroprostheses that allows hundreds of thousands of severely-to-profoundly hearing-impaired people to hear again
Results are shown without background noise and with white background noise at either −5 dB or −7.5 dB signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)
Pitch discrimination increased from a median change in F0 of 43.4% without noise to 82.2% with noise at −5 dB SNR and to 85.2% with noise at −7.5 dB SNR
Summary
Cochlear implants (CIs) are neuroprostheses that allows hundreds of thousands of severely-to-profoundly hearing-impaired people to hear again. In a healthy cochlea, sound information is transferred to the auditory nerve by around 3500 hair cells[3] Despite these limitations, CIs allow the majority of users to identify words in quiet listening environments at an accuracy similar to those with normal hearing[4,5]. Rather than attempting to transfer more pitch information through the implant, we augment the electrical CI signal by delivering pitch information through haptic stimulation on the forearm (“electro-haptic stimulation”[22]). We aimed to achieve an average pitch discrimination threshold of 6% (1 semitone) or better This would allow CI users to track musical melodies (the smallest musical interval for western melodies is typically 1 semitone) and give access to cues for emotion and intention in speech
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