NCT03892941

Electric Pace-pitched Hearing Achieves Natural Tonotopy

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 30 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Maastricht University Medical Center · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

In search of the best possible outcome for the severe hearing impaired who have regained the ability to hear by means of a cochlear implant (CI), electrical stimulation and the information it carries should match as closely as possible to what the human brain naturally has evolved to cope with and learned to process instead of relying on plasticity to adapt to an induced mismatch. At the moment, however, CI's are fitted with a 'one size fits all' principle. This is known to cause a mismatch between the frequencies presented by the CI electrode array and the frequencies represented at the corresponding natural acoustic location in an individual cochlea. In this study it is hypothesized that an individual imaged based fitting that pursues natural hearing alignment and is implemented from the start of the rehabilitation process, will improve the individual outcomes of electric hearing. The natural fitting strategy is thought to give rise to a steeper learning curve, result in a better performance in challenging listening situations, improve sound quality, complement better with residual acoustic hearing in the contralateral ear and win the preference of CI-recipients.

Conditions

• Deafness

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Imaged based fitting	Mapping of the electrical input of the cochlear implant will be based on an individualized natural frequency alignment as estimated with imaging methods.

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-03-18
• Primary completion: 2021-03-18
• Completion: 2021-03-18
• First posted: 2019-03-27
• Last updated: 2019-03-27

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Netherlands