This project represents the culmination of the past 6 years of research into the development of a training program for postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users. We have created an online, adaptive, and scalable training program that aims to help CI users learn to hear with their devices. The program was built using HiPerCiC, a Django-based web framework that enables students to efficiently create online research applications.
The training itself is grounded in theories of cognition, perceptual learning, generalization, and basic speech and language processing. Four days a week, a user taking part in the program will complete a series of training modules, each of which targets a specific aspect of hearing: traditional linguistic tasks, such as meaningful sentence identification and word recognition, as well as non-speech paralinguistic tasks such as talker voice recognition and the identification of environmental sounds. At this time, few supervised training programs exist for adult cochlear implant users. Our training program innovates over existing options by accommodating multiple levels of proficiency, featuring open set responses, and providing users with instant feedback. The adaptive nature of the program requires users to always improve, automatically including more difficult items as participants show mastery of previous levels.