Objective speech intelligibility measurement for cochlear implant users in complex listening environments.

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Speech processing
• Hearing science

Background:

• Objective intelligibility measures offer cost-effective, repeatable assessments for speech technology.
• Existing measures are limited for hearing restorative devices like cochlear implants (CIs).
• Complex listening conditions (noise, reverberation) challenge current objective measures.

Purpose of the Study:

• Evaluate existing objective speech intelligibility measures.
• Propose and validate refined objective measures for cochlear implant (CI) users.
• Assess performance under challenging noise and reverberation conditions.

Main Methods:

• Compared five existing objective intelligibility measures.
• Developed two refined objective measures inspired by cochlear implant (CI) signal processing.
• Evaluated measures against subjective intelligibility ratings in noise, reverberation, and combined conditions.

Main Results:

• Proposed CI-inspired objective measures significantly outperformed existing methods.
• Improvements of up to 22% in rank correlation were observed.
• Refined measures demonstrated enhanced accuracy in complex acoustic environments.

Conclusions:

• CI-inspired objective measures provide more reliable speech intelligibility assessment for hearing loss.
• These refined measures are suitable for evaluating hearing assistive technologies in realistic conditions.
• Advancements facilitate the development and validation of innovative hearing solutions.