Electrical stimulation of residual hearing in the implanted cochlea

Abstract

The average profoundly deaf person using a cochlear implant can now understand more speech than some severely to profoundly deaf people who use a hearing aid. For this reason there will be an increasing need to consider implanting people with residual hearing. In many of these people there could be significant hearing in the operated ear, as a majority of severely to profoundly deaf people are likely to have a symmetrical hearing loss. When three frequency average hearing thresholds were measured on 219 pensioners from the Australian National Acoustic Laboratories (H. Dillon, unpublished findings), 64% had less than a 10-dB difference between thresholds in each ear.