The effect of binaural beamforming technology on speech intelligibility in bimodal cochlear implant recipients

Although the benefit of bimodal listening in cochlear implant
users has been agreed on, speech comprehension remains a
challenge in acoustically complex real-life environments due
to reverberation and disturbing background noises. One way
to additionally improve bimodal auditory performance is the
use of directional microphones. The objective of this study
was to investigate the effect of a binaural beamformer for bimodal
cochlear implant (CI) users. This prospective study
measured speech reception thresholds (SRT) in noise in a repeated-
measures design that varied in listening modality for
static and dynamic listening conditions. A significant improvement
in SRT of 4.7 dB was found with the binaural
beamformer switched on in the bimodal static listening condition.
No significant improvement was found in the dynamic
listening condition. We conclude that there is a clear additional
advantage of the binaural beamformer in bimodal CI
users for predictable/static listening conditions with frontal
target speech and spatially separated noise sources.