The punctuation mark in an equilibrium state: Modern signal processing

Abstract

As recently as the late 1980s, the speech reception performance of cochlear implants (CIs) was relatively poor compared to today’s performance. As noted in the 1988 NIH Consensus Statement on CIs, only about 1 in 20 users of the best CIs at the time could carry out a normal conversation without the aid of lipreading. In contrast, the great majority of today’s users can understand speech in relatively quiet conditions with their CIs and restored hearing alone. Indeed, most users communicate routinely via telephone conversations. As noted in the 1995 NIH Consensus Statement on CIs in Adults and Children, “A majority of those individuals with the latest speech processors for their implants will score above 80 percent correct on high context sentences, even without visual cues.” Such abilities are a long trip from total or nearly total deafness. In this talk, I will (1) present some historical aspects; (2) describe the jump up in performance that was achieved in 1989 and provided the basis for many subsequent developments; and (3) mention some possibilities for further improvements in these already marvelous devices.