Telephone Use by Patients Fitted with the lneraid Cochlear Implant

Abstract

A 0 S T R A C TA survey of telephone use by 66 patients fitted with the lneraid cochlear prosthesis revealed that 51% initiate telephone calls (most calls are to family or friends) and that 66% answer the telephone. Of the patients who answer the telephone, 49% indicated that they could identify the gender and/or age of the caller most of the time, 27% could identify a familiar caller most of the time, and 48% indicated that they could understand a conversation most of the time if speaking to a familiar speaker about a familiar topic. Understanding dropped rapidly as the speaker and topic became unfamiliar (Ear Hear 12 5368-369).IN THIS REPORT, we describe the results of a questionnaire study of telephone use by patients who hear by means of the Richards/Ineraid cochlear implant (Eddington, 1980; for a recent review, RESULTSThe results are shown in Table 1 DISCUSSION The responses to the questionnaire leave no doubt that many Ineraid patients use the telephone. About half of the sample initiate calls and about two-thirds answer the telephone. Of the 66% who answer the telephone, 48% indicated that they could understand a familiar caller and a familiar topic most of the time. Thus, about one-third of the total sample claimed to understand a telephone conversation with a familiar speaker and a familiar topic. As the speaker and message uncertainty increased, the number of patients who claimed to understand a caller decreased to a lower limit of only 5%, who claimed to understand an unfamiliar caller and an unfamiliar topic.A relationship between CID sentence intelligibility and telephone use, suggested first for hearing-impaired students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), and which held for a small sample of Nucleus patients (Cohen et al, 1989), holds for Ineraid patients. That is, patients with scores greater than 50% on the CID sentences are significantly more likely to initiate calls than patients with scores less than 50% (z = 3.8, p < 0.001). Eighty five percent of patients with CID scores greater than 60% initiate calls, whereas only 3 1% of patients with scores less than 40% initiate calls.

Telephone use and the factors influencing it among cochlear implant patients

“…254 were returned for a response rate of 49%. This response rate is similar to previous studies (Dorman et al, 2001;Cray et al, 2004). Of these 254, 87% of patients were classified as telephone users.…”

“…Encouragingly, when phone use in cochlear implant patients is compared to these previous studies, the overall percentage of users has been increasing steady. Dorman et al (2001) reported that 66% used a phone, whereas Cray et al (2004) reported that 70% used the phone. This increasing trend of phone use is encouraging given the positive psychological and sociological benefits it has.…”

Rehabilitative Challenges in Working with the Late-Deafened Adult

“…There has been ample demonstration because the early reports of the improvement in threshold and increased closed-set speech discrimination ability (Gantz et al, 1988;Mecklenburg & Brimacombe, 1985). Further, with ongoing refinement in signalprocessing methods (Tyler, 1993;Tyler, Haskell, & Parkinson, 1994), open-set speech recognition (McKay, Vandali, McDermott, & Clark, 1994;Wilson, Lawson, Finley, & Wolford, 1993) and telephone communica-tion (Cohen, Waltzman, & Shapiro, 1989;Dorman, Dove, Parkin, Zacharchuk, & Dankowski, 1991) are becoming more common among implantees.…”

Adaptation of cochlear implant fitting to various telecommunication systems: a proposal for a ‘telephone map'

“…There are plenty of papers in the scientific literature investigating the ability to perceive telephone speech in CI patients. The first pioneering studies date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s [4]. In these works, mostly based on ad hoc questionnaires, the main problems are first outlined: perception of timbre, making it difficult to differentiate a female voice from a male one; understanding unfamiliar voices, with a greater perceptual difficulty if the communication takes place with a stranger; little/no clues on the discussion topic, whereas its a priori knowledge increases the brain's deductive skill, since the peripheral input signal is poor.…”