Benefits of upgrading to the Nucleus® 6 sound processor for a wider clinical population.
OBJECTIVES
To determine whether a large clinical group of cochlear implant (CI) recipients demonstrated a difference in sentence recognition in noise when using their pre-upgrade sound processor compared to when using the Nucleus 6 processor, and to examine the impact of the following factors: implant type, sound processor type, age, or onset of hearing loss.


METHODS
A file review of 154 CI recipients (aged 7-92 years old) who requested an upgrade to the Nucleus 6 sound processor at the Cochlear Care Centre Melbourne was conducted. 105 recipients had complete data collected according to the protocol. A repeated measures, single subject design was used. Performance of CI recipients was compared with their pre-upgrade sound processor versus the Nucleus 6 processor using the Australian Sentence Test in Noise.


RESULTS
Group performance of CI recipients improved by 4.7 dB with the Nucleus 6 compared with the pre-upgrade sound processor. The benefit was not affected by pre-upgrade sound processor type or implant type (including older implant types and sound processors), age or onset of hearing loss (pre-lingual versus post-lingual).


CONCLUSION
This study confirmed that a clinical group of CI recipients obtained a significant benefit when upgrading to the Nucleus 6 sound processor.
['Todorov|Michelle J|MJ|', 'Galvin|Karyn L|KL|']
D000293:Adolescent D000328:Adult D000368:Aged D000369:Aged, 80 and over D001315:Australia D002648:Child D019929:Cochlear Implantation D003054:Cochlear Implants D003638:Deafness D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D008838:Microcomputers D008875:Middle Aged D009622:Noise D010470:Perceptual Masking D013016:Sound D013067:Speech Perception D055815:Young Adult
Sound processor Cochlear implant Implant Nucleus 6 Age Pre-lingual Cochlear limited speech recognition