Evaluation of an Adaptive Dynamic Compensation System in Cochlear Implant Listeners.
Florian Langner, Andreas Büchner, Waldo Nogueira
PMID 33356927WHAT IT FOUND
In cochlear implant listeners, the Voice Guard setting did not improve speech understanding in noise compared with a standard compression setting, but it did improve speech understanding in quiet.
Key findings
01In quiet, speech intelligibility was higher with Voice Guard than AGC (69.6% vs 59.9%), but in noise the difference was not significant.
02A computerized intelligibility measure was higher with Voice Guard than AGC across all tested SNRs (0.746 vs 0.733).
03Voice Guard did not significantly improve logatome perception overall.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 10 participants, so it cannot show how most cochlear implant users would respond. Only seven participants completed the consonant recognition task because of time constraints during routine visits. All participants used Voice Guard as their everyday clinical setting, so they were familiar with it and not with AGC. Testing was acute and did not allow long-term familiarization with the settings. The experimental input dynamic range was 35 to 85 dB SPL, not the 25 to 95 dB SPL range used clinically. Speech in noise was tested only at +10 dB SNR. Objective measures used a sine-carrier vocoder that reduced available information for both settings.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. Funding was reported as support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that Voice Guard improves everyday speech understanding in noise. The speech-in-noise difference was not significant, and testing was acute with limited familiarization.