On the design and evaluation of the PDA-based research platform for electric and acoustic stimulation.

The aim of the paper is to describe the bimodal (combining electrical stimulation via the implant with acoustic stimulation via hearing aids) design of the PDA-based research platform and present results from a short-term evaluation with five bimodal cochlear implant users. The evolution of the PDA platform has been reported earlier in terms of development and its potential in various experiments. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the platform with bimodal users in terms of speech intelligibility in quiet, 10dB and 5dB SNR conditions and compares the results with the users' own clinical processor. The results of this clinical trial will encourage researchers in this area to use the platform in their future studies as it provides unparalleled flexibility along with a large suite of applications to conduct a wide variety of experiments for electric-only and combined electric and acoustic stimulation (EAS) for long-term chronic studies with great ease.