Electro-Haptic Stimulation: A New Approach for Improving Cochlear-Implant Listening
Carl Verschuur and Mark Fletcher have written a paper about Electro-Haptic devices in their new paper “Electro-Haptic Stimulation: A New Approach for Improving Cochlear-Implant Listening.”
Haptic (or tactile) aids for the hearing-impaired, which turn sound into a sensation of touch on the skin, were rendered obsolete in the 1990s by the development and success of cochlear implants. However, more recently, the idea of combining tactile/haptic stimulation with cochlear implants has been developed. Researchers have recently shown compelling evidence that haptic stimulation can improve and enhance the sound signal provided by the cochlear implant, leading to enhanced speech-in-noise performance, sound localization, and music perception.
In this paper, Carl Verschuur and Mark Fletcher review the evidence of Electro-Haptic Stimulation (EHS) enhancement of cochlear implant listening and discuss key areas where further research is required. These include understanding the neural basis of EHS enhancement, understanding the effectiveness of EHS across different clinical populations, and the optimization of signal-processing strategies. They also discuss the significant potential for a new generation of haptic neuroprosthetic devices to aid those who cannot access hearing-assistive technology, either because of biomedical or healthcare-access issues.
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