Cochlear Hearing Loss

This is a prospective and monocentric clinical investigation, non-interventional and non-randomized. The overall goal of this clinical study is to generate additional clinical data confirming the safety and efficacy of the remote programming functionality of Target CI version 1.5 and the AB Remote Support app. Hearing outcomes are expected to be similar whether a study subject's sound processor is programmed in the traditional method in the audiologist's office or whether programming is performed via remote fitting. Therefore, the study uses a non-inferiority design to determine whether sentence recognition in noise is no worse with remote fitting than in an in-office setting.

The study is about the importance of each follow-up visit after activating a new cochlear implant in addition to evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of a new programming strategy from Cochlear Americas. Investigators are looking for patients who have recently selected Cochlear Americas as their cochlear implant manufacturer of choice for their upcoming surgery. The aim of this study is to determine if 1) patient outcomes remain stable when reducing follow-up appointments and 2) Cochlear's population mean mapping can produce similar outcomes with patients while additionally reducing appointment times. The hypothesis is that using population mean mapping and reducing the number of follow-up visits after activation will yield similar performance outcomes to a standard of care while decreasing the length of appointment times and number of appointments needed for each patient.

The goal of this observational study is to learn how listening effort affects brain development and daily life in school-aged children (ages 6-18) who use cochlear implants (CIs), which are electronic devices surgically placed in the ear to help children with severe hearing loss hear sounds. The main questions it aims to answer are: Do children with CIs use more mental energy to listen than children with normal hearing, and does this extra effort slow their brain development over time? Does listening with two ears (bilateral CIs or a CI plus a hearing aid) reduce listening effort compared to listening with one ear only? How does listening effort affect children's ability to get along with others and adapt to daily life? Researchers will compare children with CIs to children with normal hearing to see if differences in listening effort lead to differences in cognitive development, social skills, and quality of life over 3 years. Participants will: Complete hearing tests to measure how well they understand speech in quiet and noisy settings Wear a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) headset and eye-tracking glasses during a short listening task (about 15-40 minutes) so researchers can measure brain activity and pupil size changes - these are safe, painless, and non-invasive ways to see how hard the brain is working to listen Take thinking and memory tests appropriate for their age Have a parent or guardian answer questions about their child's social skills and daily communication Return for the same set of tests at 1 year and 3 years after the first visit This study does not involve any new treatment or change to a child's current care. All children will continue their regular medical and rehabilitation plans. The study aims to enroll 360 children (120 with normal hearing and 240 with cochlear implants) at Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital in China. Results may help doctors better understand when children with CIs need extra support and how to improve rehabilitation strategies.

Patients with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) show significant deficits and strong unexplained intersubject variability in their perception and production of spoken emotions in speech. This project will investigate the hypothesis that "cue-weighting", or how patients utilize the different acoustic cues to emotion, accounts for significant variance in emotional communication with CIs. The results will focus on children with CIs, but parallel measures in postlingually deaf adults with CIs will be made, ensuring that results of these studies benefit social communication by CI patients across the lifespan by informing the development of technological innovations and improved clinical protocols.

The goal of this interventional study is to describe how people with cochlear implants perceive the perceive speech in noise and their sound environment on adults who are native French speakers with typical hearing or with cochlear implant(s). The measures and strategies developed in this project could benefit all current and future cochlear implant wearers by improving their perception of the sound environment and their quality of life on a daily basis. Researchers will compare normal hearing participant and participants with cochlear implant to describe the speech in noise and their perception of the sound environment. Participants will perform audiological tests to assess their perception of the sound environment, with and without speech enhancement.