• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.45-51
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• 2022

Sound quality evaluation is one of the psychoacoustic methods to measure subjective judgements for sound color. The purpose of this study is to investigate sound quality benefits of bimodal users by comparing sound quality scores between bimodal hearing condition and unilateral cochlear implant(CI) condition as a preliminary study. Thirteen bimodal users and seven unilateral CI users were participated in this study. Audiologists performed pure tone and speech audiometry and measured functional gain and real-ear insertion gain. Subjective assessment of sound quality was followed with four sounds including violin sound, male and female voices, and refrigerator noise. Participants judged the sound quality with six sound quality index. Bimodal users showed mean 0.8 points more sound quality improvements in bimodal condition than unilateral CI condition. Group comparison between bimodal and unilateral CI users showed no differences. A follow-up study of sound quality tools and methods should be considered to evaluate subjective bimodal benefits of cochlear implant users.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2011

A sensorineural hearing loss(SNHL) occurs when the cochlea in the inner has functional problem. The region in the cochlea with no(or very few) functioning inner hair cells or neurons called 'dead regions'. Amplification using hearing aid over a frequency range corresponding to a dead region may not a beneficial. In this paper, we compared speech recognition with different location of dead region and gain and searched effective gain for hearing aid with dead region. In order to experiment, eight people who has normal hearing ware tested, and we used white noise and babble noise(SNR=0 dB). we divided by three conditions, low, mid and high frequency dead region. In addition, the gains in dead region ware 14.5 dB, 11.5dB and 6 dB gain. There ware different results by location of dead region. The result of WRS and preference in mid-frequency dead region and high-frequency dead region ware higher than them in low-frequency dead region. When we compared as gains, the score of WRS with lower gain was higher than 14.5 dB gain, and the preference was lower as higher gain.