Sound-location could improve for patients with hearing loss

Hearing aid and cochlear implant (CI) users often struggle to locate and separate sounds. Recent work at Southampton Auditory Implant Service (USAIS) has shown that CI users locate and separate sounds substantially better when additional sound information is provided through haptic stimulation on each wrist.  Here are some papers on this subject:

In their latest paper on haptic stimulation, the team from USAIS (Mark Fletcher, Jana Zgheib and Samuel Perry) conducted experiments that revealed the remarkable sensitivity of the skin to sound localisation cues. They also found that this sensitivity was highly robust to aging.

After completing the experiments, the team concluded that:

These findings suggest that high-precision haptic sound-localisation can be achieved, which could aid many hearing-impaired listeners. Furthermore, the finding that high-fidelity across-wrist intensity information can be transferred could be exploited in human–machine interfaces to enhance virtual reality and improve remote control of military, medical, or research robots.

Read about these experiments and detailed results in the latest paper from the Electro-haptics team; Sensitivity to haptic sound-localisation cues, which was published in nature.com

To find out more about this project and the numerous papers the team has produced along with pictures of the research team, go to the Electro-haptics website page

If you have any further queries about any of these papers you can contact the author on m.d.fletcher@soton.ac.uk