Improving the performance of hearing prostheses
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Improving the performance of hearing prostheses in challenging listening situations: how much compromise has resulted in implementing a clinical device?
IRAS ID
159975
Contact name
Michael A Stone
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Associate Vice-President (Research Integrity),University of Manchester
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 9 months, 30 days
Research summary
Devices which restore at least partially the sense of hearing are called hearing prostheses. There are at least three methods by which they do this: (1) mechanical vibration of bones of the skull (2) delivery of acoustic vibrations (sound) via the ear canal (such as by a conventional hearing aid) and (3) electrical stimulation of nerves at some point in the auditory pathway between ear and brain devices (such as by auditory brainstem implants or cochlear implants).
Hearing prostheses perform many manipulations on the acoustic signal as it is processed to enable it to be "heard" clearly by the patient. These manipulations unavoidably introduce distortions that disrupt the extraction of meaning by the patient. The goal of this research is to minimise the impact of these processing distortions, so that after unavoidably suffering further distortion by the impaired hearing system, performance on a variety of hearing-related tasks is optimised for that patient.
We wish to measure performance in a variety of tasks by participants who routinely wear, or are candidates for, clinically-fitted hearing prostheses. The tasks fall into several categories:
(1) clinical measures of basic hearing function including, but not limited to audiometry,
(2) psychophysical tasks using specialist signals generated by the experimenter
(3) measures of speech intelligibility resulting from use of such hearing devices, or computer simulations of these devices.Delivery of test stimuli will be via one of insert earphones, headphones or loudpseakers for acoustic stimuli, or electrodes of clinically fitted implants (as appropriate).
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/NW/1365
Date of REC Opinion
21 Nov 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion