Benefits of upgrading to the Nucleus ® 6 sound processor for a wider clinical population.

OBJECTIVES: To determine whether a large clinical group of cochlear implant (CI) recipients demonstrated a difference in sentence recognition in noise when using their pre-upgrade sound processor compared to when using the Nucleus 6 processor, and to examine the impact of the following factors: implant type, sound processor type, age, or onset of hearing loss.

METHODS: A file review of 154 CI recipients (aged 7-92 years old) who requested an upgrade to the Nucleus 6 sound processor at the Cochlear Care Centre Melbourne was conducted. 105 recipients had complete data collected according to the protocol. A repeated measures, single subject design was used. Performance of CI recipients was compared with their pre-upgrade sound processor versus the Nucleus 6 processor using the Australian Sentence Test in Noise.

RESULTS: Group performance of CI recipients improved by 4.7 dB with the Nucleus 6 compared with the pre-upgrade sound processor. The benefit was not affected by pre-upgrade sound processor type or implant type (including older implant types and sound processors), age or onset of hearing loss (pre-lingual versus post-lingual).

CONCLUSION: This study confirmed that a clinical group of CI recipients obtained a significant benefit when upgrading to the Nucleus 6 sound processor.