Reducing the impact of wind noise on cochlear implant processors with two microphones

Behind-the-ear (BTE) processors of cochlear implant (CI) devices offer little to almost no protection from wind noise in most incidence angles. To assess speech intelligibility, eight CI recipients were tested in 3 and 9m/s wind. Results indicated that speech intelligibility decreased substantially when the wind velocity, and in turn the wind sound pressure level, increased. A two-microphone wind noise suppression strategy was developed. Scores obtained with this strategy indicated substantial gains in speech intelligibility over other conventional noise reduction strategies tested.This work was supported by NIH/NIDCD R03-DC-008882 to K.K