Hearing Configurations Involving More Than a Unilateral Cochlear Implant

A unilateral cochlear implant (CI) may be augmented with another CI on the contralateral side or with the use of residual hearing on either or both sides. Most often, residual hearing is at low frequencies only and usually, a hearing aid is needed to produce sufficiently loud percepts for each acoustically stimulated ear. These hearing configurations beyond a unilateral CI can provide great benefits, including (1) better speech reception in typical acoustic environments that include multiple talkers or other sources of sound and (2) better reception of music and musical sounds when acoustic stimulation is added to electric stimulation. The configurations, candidacy, and tradeoffs associated with them are described in this chapter.