Electro-haptic enhancement of spatial hearing in cochlear implant users
Electro-haptic enhancement of spatial hearing in cochlear implant users
Cochlear implants (CIs) have enabled hundreds of thousands of profoundly hearing-impaired people to perceive sounds by electrically stimulating the auditory nerve. However, CI users are often very poor at locating sounds, which leads to impaired sound segregation and threat detection. We provided missing spatial hearing cues through haptic stimulation to augment the electrical CI signal. We found that this “electro-haptic” stimulation dramatically improved sound localisation. Furthermore, participants were able to effectively integrate spatial information transmitted through these two senses, performing better with combined audio and haptic stimulation than with either alone. Our haptic signal was presented to the wrists and could readily be delivered by a low-cost wearable device. This approach could provide a non-invasive means of improving outcomes for the vast majority of CI users who have only one implant, without the expense and risk of a second implantation.
Fletcher, Mark
ac11588a-fafe-4dbb-8b3c-80a6ff030546
Cunningham, Robyn
a3adff43-40a0-4152-9488-66b92a602a88
Mills, Sean
7d497d49-f9bb-422e-b283-dce2a84de5fb
31 January 2020
Fletcher, Mark
ac11588a-fafe-4dbb-8b3c-80a6ff030546
Cunningham, Robyn
a3adff43-40a0-4152-9488-66b92a602a88
Mills, Sean
7d497d49-f9bb-422e-b283-dce2a84de5fb
Fletcher, Mark, Cunningham, Robyn and Mills, Sean
(2020)
Electro-haptic enhancement of spatial hearing in cochlear implant users.
Scientific Reports, 10 (1), [1621].
(doi:10.1038/s41598-020-58503-8).
Abstract
Cochlear implants (CIs) have enabled hundreds of thousands of profoundly hearing-impaired people to perceive sounds by electrically stimulating the auditory nerve. However, CI users are often very poor at locating sounds, which leads to impaired sound segregation and threat detection. We provided missing spatial hearing cues through haptic stimulation to augment the electrical CI signal. We found that this “electro-haptic” stimulation dramatically improved sound localisation. Furthermore, participants were able to effectively integrate spatial information transmitted through these two senses, performing better with combined audio and haptic stimulation than with either alone. Our haptic signal was presented to the wrists and could readily be delivered by a low-cost wearable device. This approach could provide a non-invasive means of improving outcomes for the vast majority of CI users who have only one implant, without the expense and risk of a second implantation.
Text
s41598-020-58503-8
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Accepted/In Press date: 15 January 2020
e-pub ahead of print date: 31 January 2020
Published date: 31 January 2020
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Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 437462
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/437462
ISSN: 2045-2322
PURE UUID: 4f012c69-0928-42d2-9737-0f44a55434d0
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Date deposited: 31 Jan 2020 17:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 06:07
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Author:
Robyn Cunningham
Author:
Sean Mills
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