Author(s)
Benjamin L. Hamel BS
Kara J. Vasil AuD
Valeriy Shafiro PhD
Aaron C. Moberly MD
Michael S. Harris MD
Affiliation(s)
Medical College of Wisconsin
Abstract:
Educational Objective: At the conclusion of this presentation, the participants should be able to understand the importance of environmental sound awareness in cochlear implant users and have a basis for counseling patients regarding possible post-CI environmental sound awareness. Objectives: Improved access to nonspeech environmental sounds is one of the most commonly expressed motivations among adults with sensorineural hearing loss considering cochlear implant (CI) surgery. The primary aim of this study was to quantify the degree to which environmental sound awareness (ESA) for safety relevant sounds differs between experienced CI users and CI candidates. We hypothesized that awareness for safety relevant sounds would be superior among experienced CI users compared to CI candidates and an inverse relationship would be seen between age at implantation and accuracy of ESA for safety relevant sounds. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: A sample of 19 adult, postlingually deaf CI candidates and 47 experienced CI users were assessed for ESA using Familiar Environmental Sound Test Identification (FEST-I), a closed set, forced choice paradigm that required identification of 25 individual environmental sounds. A subset of 11 safety relevant FEST-I sounds along with demographic and audiologic factors were evaluated. Results: Analysis of the safety relevant subset of FEST-I stimuli revealed no significant difference in safety relevant ESA skills between experienced CI users and CI candidates (68.1%, 67.9%, respectively; p = 0.49) with both scores being substantially lower than normal hearing adult peers. FEST-I scores were significantly negatively correlated with the chronological age of only experienced CI users at time of testing (p = 0.006, r = -0.395). Conclusions: Our findings support the hypothesis that ESA is highly negatively correlated with the chronological age at testing of experienced CI users. However, the hypothesis that experienced CI users would demonstrate significantly higher safety relevant ESA skills compared to CI candidates was not supported by our findings.