Benefits of upgrading to the Nucleus^® 6 sound processor for a wider clinical population

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Cochlear implant
• Sound processor
• Cochlear limited
• Nucleus 6
• speech recognition
• Implant
• Age
• Pre-lingual

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Liz Winton at the Cochlear Care Centre, Melbourne for her help in accessing the clinical database to extract the data. We would also like to thank the clinicians at the Cochlear Care Centre, Melbourne for collecting the data as part of the clinical care provided to the cochlear implant recipients.

Disclaimer statements

Contributors None.

Conflict of interest The data reported in this paper were collected by clinicians at the Cochlear Care Centre, Melbourne during clinical appointments. Collation and analysis of the data was funded under a Research Agreement between The University of Melbourne and Cochlear Limited.

Ethics approval Ethical approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital (Project no. 04/564H).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Cochlear.