CoachLea: An Android Application to evaluate the progress of speaking and hearing abilities of children with Cochlear Implant

In 2018 the WHO estimated that there are 466 million persons (34 million children) with disabling hearing loss which equals about 6.1% of the world’s population. For individuals with severe loss who do not benefit from standard hearing aids, the cochlear implant (CI) represents a very important advance in treatment. However, CI users often present altered speech production and limited understanding even after hearing rehabilitation. Thus, if the deficits of speech would be known the rehabilitation might be addressed. This is particularly important for children who were born deaf or lost their hearing ability before speech acquisition. On the one hand, they have not been able to hear other people speak in the time before the implantation. On the other hand, they have never been able to monitor their own speech. Therefore, this project proposes an Android application to evaluate the speech production and hearing abilities of children with CI.