Evaluation of noise reduction systems for cochlear implant users in different acoustic environment

Evaluation of two different noise reduction algorithms for speech intelligibility enhancement in cochlear implant (CI) users is described in this report. The algorithms accomplish sophisticated interchannel processing of the noisy speech signals, picked up with two microphones, to form an improved monaural output signal, which is directly fed into the auxiliary input of the CI speech processor. Speech intelligibility tests were carried out in different realistic everyday life listening conditions to provide general and expressive performance assessment. Extensive tests in four CI users showed considerable speech intelligibility improvement using these noise reduction systems in adverse everyday life listening conditions.