A real-time cochelar implant simulator - design and evaluation

This article describes the implementation of a flexible real-time Cochlear Implant (CI) simulator, and it’s preliminary evaluation set to investigate if a specific set of parameters can simulate the musical experience through CIs using Normal Hearing (NH) subjects. A Melodic Contour Identification (MCI) test is performed with 19 NH subjects to identify melodic contours processed by the simulator. The results showed that the participants had a decrease in precision in determining musical contours as the intervals between notes decreased, showing that the reduced spectral resolution increases the difficulty to identify smaller changes in pitch. These results fall in line with other studies that perform MCI tests on subjects with CI, suggesting that the real-time simulator can mimic the reduced spectral resolution of a CI successfully. This study validates that the implemented simulator, using a pulse-spreading harmonic complex as a carrier for a vocoder, can partially resemble the musical experience had by people with hearing loss using CI hearing technology. This suggests that the simulator might be used to further examine the characteristics that could enhance the music listening experience for people using CIs.