Involving Children and Teenagers With Bilateral Cochlear Implants in the Design of the BEARS (Both EARS) Virtual Reality Training Suite Improves Personalization

作者：Deborah Vickers, Marina Salorio‐Corbetto, Sandra Driver, Christine Rocca, Yuli Levtov, Kevin Sum, Bhavisha Parmar, Giorgos Dritsakis, Jordi Albanell Flores, Dan Jiang, Merle Mahon, Frances Early, Nejra Van Zalk, Lorenzo Picinali · 发表于：Frontiers in Digital Health · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.3389/fdgth.2021.759723 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation、Noise Effects and Management、Delphi Technique in Research

Older children and teenagers with bilateral cochlear implants often have poor spatial hearing because they cannot fuse sounds from the two ears. This deficit jeopardizes speech and language development, education, and social well-being. The lack of protocols for fitting bilateral cochlear implants and resources for spatial-hearing training contribute to these difficulties. Spatial hearing develops with bilateral experience. A large body of research demonstrates that sound localisation can improve with training, underpinned by plasticity-driven changes in the auditory pathways. Generalizing training to non-trained auditory skills is best achieved by using a multi-modal (audio-visual) implementation and multi-domain training tasks (localisation, speech-in-noise, and spatial music). The goal of this work was to develop a package of virtual-reality games (BEARS, Both EARS) to train spatial hearing in young people (8-16 years) with bilateral cochlear implants using an action-research protocol. The action research protocol used formalized cycles for participants to trial aspects of the BEARS suite, reflect on their experiences, and in turn inform changes in the game implementations. This participatory design used the stakeholder participants as co-creators. The cycles for each of the three domains (localisation, spatial speech-in-noise, and spatial music) were customized to focus on the elements that the stakeholder participants considered important. The participants agreed that th...