Abstract: |
Cochlear implants are electronic devices that stimulate directly theauditory nerve to allow totally deaf patients to hear again.This paper presents an interactive evolutionary algorithm (IEA) designed tohelp finding the best parameters of a cochlear implant for a specificpatient.If early cochlear implants only featured one electrode, modern devicesnow offer up to 22 electrodes, with the hope to be able to transmit moredetails and help the patient hear better. The work presented in thispaper shows however that having more electrodes is not necessarily better.Tests on a patient show surprisingly that some combinations of electrodesyield better results than others, with the problem that there isno real way to determinewhich electrode is beneficial to speech understanding and which is not.The best result obtained by the patient on a speech understandingevaluation protocol was 48.5/100 after 10 years of fitting sessions byan expert practitioner. For many reasons explained in this paper,the evaluation of the best parameter setting found by the IEA in oneday was 91.5/100. |
