Métodos baseados em Sorteio para Seleção de Canais de Estimulação em Implantes Cocleares

This work presents three new methods for stimulation channel selection in cochlear implants. The proposed methods are based on random selection, following a probability density function that aims to prioritize high magnitude channels and to penalize spatio-temporal contiguity of activated channels. Comparisons using speech intelligibility objective criteria and psychoacoustic experiments with normal hearing volunteers and vocoded speech resulted higher intelligibility scores than for the Advanced Combination Encoder strategy. As a result, it is possible to achieve intelligibility scores higher than 90% with only one active channel at each stimulation period.