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RLE Principal Research Scientist
Dr. Donald K. Eddington wins major $2M award from the National
Institutes of Health to conduct auditory prostheses research.
Cambridge, MA 01.01.2002
Dr.
Donald K. Eddington will lead a new research initiative entitled,
"Speech Processors for Auditory Prostheses." This $2M project will
involve a multi-institutional collaboration centered at the Research
Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). The researchers will conduct
investigations to develop new sound processing strategies for auditory
prostheses to advance toward the goal of providing deaf users better sound
quality, sound-source localization, and speech reception than what is
currently available from commercial systems.
The project
is sponsored by the National Institutes of
Health (NIH). Collaborating institutions include the Massachusetts
Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI), Boston
University, and the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The overall
efforts of this project fall into three integrated areas of
concentration. First, Dr. Eddington's team will develop flexible
hardware and software solutions to advance laboratory-based technologies
for cochlear implant evaluations. Second, the investigators will
design new speech-processing algorithms to be implemented in real time and
evaluated acutely using the team's sound processing system. Finally,
the researchers will conduct evoked potential measurements and functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a pool of subjects who exhibit a
wide range of speech-reception ability with cochlear implants. The
goal of this last area of concentration is to establish the degree to
which peripheral and central auditory systems respond normally and to
detect differences that might account for variations in performance.
Dr. Eddington
directs the Cochlear Implant Research Laboratory at MEEI, was the director
of RLE's highly successful multi-institutional W.
M. Keck Foundation Neural Prostheses Research Center, and is Associate
Professor of Otology and Laryngology at Harvard Medical School.
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