Vibration enhancement for cochlear implant users (version 1)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Can vibration enhance detection of speech in noise for cochlear implant users?
IRAS ID
244309
Contact name
Mark Fletcher
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Southampton
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
30753, ERGO ID:
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 31 days
Research summary
Cochlear implant (CI) users struggle to hear in noisy environments, and often rely heavily on lip-reading cues. Previous studies have shown that deaf participants can learn to identify words using only tactile cues from vocoded sound, which demonstrates that tactile stimulation can provide information about speech sounds. Our previous work has already shown enhancement of speech-in-noise performance by tactile stimulation of the fingertip in normal-hearing listeners listening to CI simulations. This project aims to translate this finding into CI users, and to establish whether tactile enhancement of speech-in-noise performance can be achieved when the tactile signal is presented to the wrist, which is a more realistic stimulation site for real-world use than the fingertip. Furthermore, following from our previous work which has shown a large increase in the size of tactile enhancement effects after training, tactile enhancement of speech-in-noise performance will be assessed both before and after a short training regime.
REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/NW/0310
Date of REC Opinion
30 May 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion