Study qualifications

If you answered yes to all six initial questions and are interested in participation, please fill out the contact form. After we receive your message, we will send you an email with additional information about the study. You will be asked to provide more detailed information about yourself, your hearing history and your cochlear implant use. After you submit that information, a member of the study staff will contact you to discuss study participation and, if you qualify, schedule a convenient time for you to start the training program.

In the meantime, you can try some demo exercises. To log in, please go to the login page and use login username 'guest' and password 'practice', both without quotes.

Participation

Study actives are expected to take about three months. During the initial six weeks, you will perform testing and training exercises at home using your own computer and audio system. After these initial six weeks, there will be one month without any tests or exercises. Finally, you will complete one more week of study tests. The difference between your initial and your final test results will be used to determine if the training program was effective in improving your hearing.

Every week will have four days of exercises, with 4-6 exercises for each day. Each exercise will take about 5-10 minutes. You can try to finish each day's exercises in a single sitting, or you can try to break it into smaller chunks. All exercises for one day are expected to take about 30-45 minutes to complete.

During the first week you will complete auditory tests that involve listening to tones, noises, speech, music and environmental sounds. During the next four weeks you will participate in either auditory training with speech or environmental sounds or, if you are assigned to a control goup, you will read excerpts from a collection of interviews, narratives and lectures and answer questions about them. The results of the control group will help us determine which training method was most effective for improving hearing with a cochlear implant. Your assignment to a specific group will be done randomly before any training begins and it will not change until all assigned tests and exercises for that group are completed. However, after you complete all exercises assigned to your group, you will have an opportunity to complete training exercises assigned to any other group in this study as well. This way you may be able to improve your hearing even further.

You will be able to do all study exercises at home using the Internet and your computer and audio system. The training exercises in this study are experimental and are not considered routine medical care. These activities are being done to evaluate benefits of auditory training. Participation in the study is free to you.

Demo exercises

You can try some demo exercises and get a better idea about how the study works. To log in, please go to the login page and use login username 'guest' and password 'practice', both without quotes.

You can also login here.