Conversion from the Body-worn Spectra to the Ear-level ESPrit22 in Children

A multi-centre study was conducted involving 93 children, aged 5.7 to 18.0 years, who approached their cochlear implant centres for conversion from the body-worn Spectra to the ear-level ESPrit22 processor. Eighty-seven per cent of the children attending the centres could be fitted with the ESPrit22 without any program adjustment, 9% required some adjustment and 4% were unable to be fitted with the ESPrit22 because of high power requirements in the speech processor program. For subjects requiring significant adjustment to stimulation mode for ESPrit22 fitting an initial decrease in word recognition was observed, with progressive improvement over time. For those subjects where direct conversion from the Spectra to the ESPrit22 was possible (n = 60) mean monosyllabic open-set word recognition at initial fitting was equivalent between the two processors. However after using the ESPrit22 for a period of 4 weeks there was a significant improvement in performance from 46.5% with the Spectra to 54.4% with the ESPrit22. A similar pattern was observed for BKB sentence recognition in noise with a smaller group of 8 subjects. The majority of children reported immediate adjustment to the ESPrit22 and chose to use the ESPrit22 for most of the time in a range of listening environments.