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Objective:

This paper evaluates the benefit of the two-microphone adaptive beamformer BEAM™ in the Nucleus Freedom™ cochlear implant (CI) system for speech understanding in background noise by CI users.

Design:

A double-blind evaluation of the two-microphone adaptive beamformer BEAM and a hardware directional microphone was carried out with five adult Nucleus CI users. The test procedure consisted of a pre-and post-test in the lab and a 2-wk trial period at home. In the pre-and post-test, the speech reception threshold (SRT) with sentences and the percentage correct phoneme scores for CVC words were measured in quiet and background noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. Performance was assessed for two different noise configurations (with a single noise source and with three noise sources) and two different noise materials (stationary speech-weighted noise and multitalker babble). During …