gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Since 1984, the speech performance of adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients has undergone evaluation and classification. Over the years, surgical procedures, cochlear implant technologies and recipient selection have changed, speech perception outcomes have improved and it has proved necessary to revise the performance categories “good”, “medium” and “poor”.

Method: Out of a homogenous group of 864 recipients, five subgroups were formed based on time of implantation, implant type and the predominant speech coding strategy applied.

The speech tracking test without lip-reading was chosen, as it simulates everyday conversation very closely and because a reference to the normal German speech rate is given. The assessment scale is expressed in terms of the mean of the speech tracking results plus or minus standard deviation.

Results: The best results were achieved by the fifth and most recent recipient subgroup. They were, therefore, selected for the creation of the new assessment scale, representing as they do the future advances set to take place in speech understanding.

Recipients whose speech understanding is 65 words per minute are assigned to the performance category “good” and those whose speech understanding score is less than 15 words per minute being placed in the category “poor”.

Conclusion: Recipients assigned to the performance category “good” have already achieved high scores in communication, whereas further improvement is expected for those categorised as “medium” and “poor”.