Deafness in pediatric age can adversely impact language acquisition as well as educational and social-emotional development. Once diagnosed, hearing loss should be rehabilitated early; the goal is to provide the child with maximum access to the acoustic features of speech within a listening range that is safe and comfortable. In presence of severe to profound deafness, benefit from auditory amp...

4.1 Definition...........................................................................................2 4.2 Short Description..................................................................................2 4.3 State of R&D .......................................................................................2 4.3.1 Bone and Dental Implants ...................................................

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE Music is a universal, cross-cultural phenomenon. Perception and enjoyment of music are still not solved with current technological objectives of cochlear implants. The objective of this article was to advance the development and validation of a method of programming of cochlear implants that implements a frequency allocation strategy. We compared standard programming ...

Neural prostheses, such as cochlear and retinal implants, induce perceptual responses by electrically stimulating sensory nerves. These devices restore sensory system function by using patterned electrical stimuli to evoke neural responses. An understanding of their function requires knowledge of the nerves responses to relevant electrical stimuli as well as the likely effects of pathology on n...

The medial superior olive (MSO) is a key auditory brainstem structure that receives binaural inputs and is implicated in processing interaural time disparities used for sound localization. The deaf white cat, a proven model of congenital deafness, was used to examine how deafness and cochlear implantation affected the synaptic organization at this binaural center in the ascending auditory pathw...

Increasing the number of channels at low frequencies improves discrimination of fundamental frequency (F0) in cochlear implants (Geurts, L., Wouters, J., 2004. Better place-coding of the fundamental frequency in cochlear implants. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 115 (2), 844-852). We conducted three experiments to test whether improved F0 discrimination can be translated into increased speech intelligibili...

Deafness and cochlear implants: According to the WHO estimates, 278 million people worldwide have moderate to profound hearing loss in both ears. In consequence hearing impairment and deafness have a strong social-economic impact on individuals families and communities. Children with hearing impairment often experience delayed in the development of speech, language and cognitive skills, which m...

This master thesis is a combination of two areas of Sound and Music Computing, Blind Source Separation and Cochlear Implants. The research focuses in the evaluation of existing source separation algorithms in order to improve noise reduction strategies in the context of cochlear implants. The modification and adaptation of a low latency algorithm is the point of start for the evaluation based i...

The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate speech perception and localization abilities in children who have received sequential cochlear implants, with the first implant received before age 4 and the second implant received before age 12. Results indicate performance in the bilateral cochlear implant condition is significantly better than listening with each implant alone for the outcom...