Evaluation Process for CIs - Your experience?

Wanted to share a recently noted hearing improvement.

Over the past couple weeks I have noticed hearing directionality. It’s improving a bunch.
Able to find birds, insects and my wife making noise.

Next month, October, will be one year since my first implant. The second will be in January.

And music is getting a little better.

For those interested, I rarely make changes on the Cochlear Nucleus app. Have a few times but put things back. Must be the Deep Neural Network and 12 million sound scenes, it’s true.

Rick that is great news for you. With you being bilateral you have directionality over me. Being Bimodal it’s much more difficult to pick direction. I can hear the birds (sometimes I wish I couldn’t they are so noisy) and struggle to tell you where they are unless I can see them.

I also don’t open my nucleus smart app, I don’t have a need to adjust anything once it’s set correctly.

So I am the outlier here, I use the app to adjust sensitivity quite a bit. I found that up a couple of points makes conversations outdoors easier, and a couple of points down makes is better for concentrating at the office (or a couple points up if I want in on the gossip).

I also use the mini mic for my computer at work and the app is the easiest way to it

You mentioned using the Sensitivity adjustment in past posts. My audiologist also recommended me trying this setting. I have tried it after reading your posts. It is an amazing adjustment that really changes what you hear and understand. When my wife is in the kitchen with pots and pans make very loud noise I used this setting to mellow out that kitchen noise, it really works well. Since then I am slowly learning to adjust to these sounds without making Sensitivity adjustments. It really affects my speech understanding.

I can see if speech understanding does not get as high of percentage as desired this Sensitivity setting could probably be raised a little to sharpen sounds to improve speech understanding. Just a thought.

I don’t use it much indoors, except when I want quiet in the office, but I find it helps a lot outdoors. For instance yesterday I was doing an evaluation on one of my subordinates while he was teaching a class. Part of this was a discussion on a piece of equipment outside. So I was able to stand behind the class and be unobtrusive but still hear everything he said.

It also helps hearing my wife when we are doing yard work without being right on top of each other, except when I need to move closer so she can understand me.

And I can now sit anywhere in a classroom and still understand.