gms | German Medical Science

Objective: There is an increasing number of teenagers with cochlear implants (CI) today, as children implanted early reach secondary level. This raises the interest in better understanding the everyday hearing habits, accessory use and subjective performance of children and adolescents, with the focus on school days. The following evaluation will investigate these topics by using a questionnaire.

Method: Up to now 10 children and adolescents participated in this survey to date all with more than six months experience with any generation of an Advanced Bionics CI system. They had an age between 7 and 21 years. The questionnaire is addressing their profile, telephone use, hearing music, communication at school/university and hearing in social environments. The HSM sentence test was used to evaluate performance objectively.

Results: The score in the HSM sentence test in quiet correlated with the subjective rating of speech perception in quiet while the HSM sentence test in noise correlated with the subjective speech perception of a distant speaker. The type of school (main stream or school for hearing impaired) was independent of the overall subjective and objective speech perception. Pupils of a school for hearing impaired had significantly more difficulties to understand an unknown teacher compared to a known teacher, whereas there was no difference for pupils of a mainstream school. Similar to adult CI users, accessories were only rarely used with the exception of wireless FM systems at school and the TMic for behind-the-ear processor users.

Conclusion: CI users at schools for hearing impaired seem to have more difficulties with unknown teachers compared to mainstream CI users. The group of children using the FM system is significantly younger than the group not using the FM system. The majority are not using accessories to improve speech perception. Further investigation on the differences between CI users at different school types seems sensible.