Spatial Hearing with Electrical Stimulation Listening with Cochlear Implants

Because of the success of cochlear implantation, an increasing number of countries are willing to support bilateral implantation in patients with bilateral severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, today’s cochlear implants (CIs) technology and fitting procedure appears to treat each ear independently, as if they belong to different auditory systems. Similarly, when only one ear is deaf, in some countries a CI is applied in an attempt to restore binaural hearing. Owing to the large discrepancy in perception of sounds between one normal hearing ear and a second deaf ear with a CI, the effect of fitting a CI on spatial hearing needs to be carefully addressed. This gap between the normal hearing system and the electrically stimulated auditory system, opens an important research field: spatial hearing with electrical stimulation. In this thesis we study sound localization of different CI users and described and modelled their spatial hearing abilities