Sound Processing Innovations in Adult and Paediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients.

SPACE (Spread Precompensation Advanced Combination Encoder) is a sound coding strategy that is intended to improve spectral resolution, and hence hypothesised to improve cochlear implant (CI) speech understanding in noise. It is an alternative to the ACE sound coding strategy. It has been implemented on the Nucleus 7 CP1000 sound processor for CIC4-based implants.

OPAL-SPACE (combined OPAL and SPACE strategy) aims to preserve as many of the significant features encoded by both OPAL and SPACE strategies individually. Since SPACE codes spectral envelope information, while OPAL codes temporal periodicity information, it is reasonable to suggest that both coding techniques can be combined to improve perception additively.

Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE) is the commercially available, reference sound processing strategy.

For all strategies, programming will be performed using a research version of Custom Sound and the investigational software: Cochlear Device Interface Tool (CDI Tool). Investigational software will be used to stream stimulation sequences to a commercially available N6 sound processor using the Cochlear NIC4.1 interface.