![\"students_hearhear_thumb\"](\"http:\/\/dev.bcreativegroup.com\/jhuwse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/students_hearhear_thumb-300x202.jpg\")
\nToday, more than 325,000 deaf people around<\/strong>\u00a0the world are living with cochlear implants (CI). These tiny electronic devices don\u2019t restore normal hearing, but they provide a useful representation of sounds, making it possible to understand speech. Many people, however, face challenges learning to use cochlear implants, largely because auditory training opportunities are limited.<\/p>\n Now three Whiting School undergraduates have come up with an iPad app to expand access to auditory training, allowing deaf adults with CI to practice on their own.<\/p>\n Their work is overseen by Tilak Ratnanather, an associate research professor in the Center for Imaging Science who was born deaf but learned to communicate using hearing aids. Ratnanather received a cochlear implant in 2012, and he knows firsthand the trials of learning to use it.<\/p>\n \u201cWith a cochlear implant, it is not the same as normal hearing. It\u2019s electrical hearing. … You have to train the brain to interpret the signals,\u201d says Ratnanather.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, many adults with cochlear implants don\u2019t have access to auditory training, or their insurance companies don\u2019t provide coverage for it.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m fortunate because I work at Johns Hopkins,\u201d he says. \u201cI go to the clinic once a week for an hour, and I\u2019ve been doing that for two years. Some people only get one or two in-person training sessions a year.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s where Speech Banana comes in. The app, named for the region on an audiogram where all the phonemes of spoken languages fall, doesn\u2019t replace in-person auditory training. \u201cBut we want to supplement it,\u201d says Margo Heston, a junior biomedical engineering student.<\/p>\n The student team, which also includes junior Rohit Bhattacharya and sophomore Joanne Song, has a version of their app in beta testing with about 50 adults worldwide. They plan to make it available to the public later this year in English, and they hope to secure funds to translate it into other languages.<\/p>\n Heston says the team has put in hundreds of hours on the project so far, and while they received research credit last summer, they now consider it a personal calling. \u201cThis has real tangible potential to improve a person\u2019s functionality,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, more than 325,000 deaf people around\u00a0the world are living with cochlear implants (CI). These tiny electronic devices don\u2019t restore normal hearing, but they provide a useful representation of sounds, making it possible to understand speech. Many people, however, face challenges learning to use cochlear implants, largely because auditory training opportunities are limited. Now three…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-students","issue-summer-2014"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n