Speech recognition performance in children with cochlear implants using bimodal stimulation

Cochlear implantees have considerably good speech understanding abilities in quiet surroundings. But, ambient noise poses significant difficulties in understanding speech for these individuals. Bimodal stimulation is still not used by many Indian implantees in spite of reports that bimodal stimulation is beneficial for speech understanding in noise as compared to cochlear implant alone and also prevents auditory deprivation in the un-implanted ear. The aim of the study is to evaluate the benefits of bimodal stimulation in children in an Indian cochlear implant clinic. A group of 14 children who have been using cochlear implants served as subjects in this study. They were fitted with advanced digital hearing aids in their un-implanted ears to provide bimodal stimulation. Results revealed that bimodal stimulation did not bring greater change in speech scores in quiet surroundings but have shown a noticeable improvement in noisy ambience. Hence the present study suggests that bimodal stimulation would benefit children with cochlear implants especially in adverse listening conditions.