| The growth and progress in cochlear implants is largely motivated and driven by research in many areas of cochlear implant technologies such as speech science, bioengineering, signal processing and psychophysiology. Continuous evaluation of the performance and development of new strategies is essential for cochlear implant speech processors as the performance of cochlear implant patients varies over time. Thus, a flexible research platform that facilitates easy design, upgrade of existing algorithms and continuous study of cochlear implant is needed for the advancement in research and development of cochlear implants. This thesis work focused on providing software controlled environment to design and conduct psychoacoustic experiments using a PDA research platform for cochlear implants. The psychoacoustic experiments are used to evaluate the speech perception, intelligibility, and source localization performance of cochlear implants patients. Transformed adaptive updown methods are implemented as part of the software to use in the psychoacoustic experiments. Using the software research platform, binaural cues such as interaural level difference and interaural time difference are evaluated using normal-hearing listeners. The results are presented and compared against with prior psychoacoustic results for validation of the experimental software. |
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