"I have to knock first in case she's in there." Meet Judy Martin's babies. "They're hungry. They want their mamma." She's only recently been able to enjoy their sweet sounds. "All of a sudden, I heard all this little chattering again. It was astounding."
A case of the measles at age seven robbed Judy of her hearing and put her in a world of silence. "You do get isolated."
Three years ago Judy got a cochlear implant, an electrical device that's implanted in her head and stimulates auditory nerves.
"It's a wonderful device, but it's not perfect."
Some sounds are still muffled … something engineer Lee Krause knows from personal experience. He's suffered hearing loss for 20 years and also wears an implant. "There would be times where it just wasn't worth concentrating anymore. It was just too hard."
Along with two doctors, he developed software that customizes the implant to each person's hearing ability. Instead of using tones to test range, the computer uses the most common syllables in the English language. "Ah ma." Patients repeat what they hear. "Ah ma." "Ah na." "Ah na."
The program compares the person's responses with the computer's voice. Then it designs a setting to boost the sounds they struggle with. "We're able to say where is her error." "I love classical music, but now with this new programming I could pick out the individual instruments." Judy's not hesitant about starting up conversations. "If you're done pulling weeds I would like it if you would plant the holly bush."
Which may mean a lot more work for her husband. In a study 85-percent of patients said the optimized implant was better than the traditional model. In the future, the software could be used to design cell phones that adapt to a person's hearing abilities.
BACKGROUND: A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is deaf or severely hard of hearing. Unlike hearing aids, the implant doesn't amplify sound, but works by directly stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with an electric field. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear and a second part that's surgically placed under the skin in the side of the head. An implant has the following parts:
• A microphone, which picks up sound from the environment
• A speech processor, which selects and arranges sounds picked up by the microphone
• A transmitter and receiver, which receive signals from the speech processor and convert them into electric impulses
• An electrode array, which is a group of electrodes that collects the impulses from the stimulator and sends them to different regions of the auditory nerve
An implant does not restore normal hearing. Instead, it can give a deaf person a useful representation of sounds in the environment to help the person understand speech.
FINE TUNING: The cochlear implant is a very helpful device for the hearing impaired, but the process of fine-tuning the device for the patient's optimal hearing could be more efficient and accurate, according to University of Florida researchers. An audiologist typically evaluates patients to fit the cochlear implant processor. The expert manipulates implant settings by asking the patient if the changes help him or her understand speech better. The process often takes multiple clinic visits and several months to complete. "This traditional approach for cochlear implant device tuning has several pitfalls," Alice Holmes, Ph.D., Professor of Audiology in the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told Ivanhoe. "First, there are several million combinations of device parameters making it impossible to evaluate a patient's performance for every possible combination. This method also relies on the patient's subjective judgment, which is typically variable and inconsistent and may not reflect the best device settings for their speech recognition."
UF investigators created the cochlear implant optimization software program. In a pilot study of the software, UF researchers found the new program resulted in improved performance in all outcomes measures, including speech perception and the ability to hear over background noise. Seventeen of the 20 cochlear implant recipients who participated in the research preferred to continue using the new optimized programming over traditional cochlear implant settings. The program, known as Clarujust, is the first standard analytical approach to tuning cochlear implants. The program tests the patient's hearing using actual speech sounds, not the tones used in the traditional tuning process. The software program quickly analyzes the patient's speech comprehension to determine the best implant setting for a particular patient.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
University of Florida
Health Science Center
Jill Pease
(352) 273-5816
jpease@phhp.ufl.edu
