Enhancing adult cochlear implant utilization with remote speech perception assessments

Cochlear implants (CIs) enable sound awareness and improved speech perception for adults with moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, CI utilization among eligible adults remains low at just 2%–13% in the United States. Remote speech perception assessments may help increase adult CI utilization by helping to reduce barriers to implantation. Specifically, remote assessments may improve patient access by lessening the time and financial burden of in-person clinical visits, particularly for adults in rural or remote locations. Furthermore, remote assessments can enhance clinical efficiency by reducing the number of in-person audiology visits (typically, six visits in the first year and every 6–12 months after that), freeing up valuable clinic time for new patients. Our research group has developed a battery of robust speech perception tests intended for remote administration, including word and sentence recognition, nonword repetition, sentence comprehension, and indexical processing tasks (e.g., talker and accent perceptions). Our findings in experienced adult CI users (> 1 year of CI use) demonstrate that performance on these tasks is consistent with prior in-person testing and correlated with conventional clinical word and sentence recognition outcomes. This presentation will discuss these findings, work from other research groups, critical next steps, and clinical implications.