Prof. Martine Coene (Faculty of Humanities) receives a Marie Curie  grant.

Martine Coene’s Marie Curie grant entitled “HEARING MINDS” wil start on March 1st.

Below a brief description of the grant:

Abstract:

The regular use of an adequate hearing aid increases the chance of keeping hearing impaired patients communicatively, socially and economically active. Many profoundly deaf patients are potential candidates for cochlear implantation. The optimal use of such a device requires that the cochlear implant speech processor be adjusted so that sounds perceived by the patient are representational and at a comfortable level. In prior collaborative research, new fitting processes have been developed to optimize the patient’s hearing in a more efficient and accurate way by means of an  assisted or (semi-)automated fitting procedure in which a large number of the cochlear implant speech processor parameters may be adjusted, based on measured psycho-acoustic feedback from the implant user. Such an assisted fitting process drastically reduces the number of man-hours of fitting during the lifetime of the device with qualitatively better outcomes. However, the state-of-the-art still has a number of short-comings: (i) the self-learning character of the currently used fitting model; and (ii) the limited input data with respect to speech perception testing in very young child populations.