Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses

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ABSTRACT This application seeks partial support for the 2023, 2025, and 2027 Conferences on Implantable Auditory Prostheses (CIAP). The 2023 CIAP is scheduled to be held at the Granlibakken Conference Center, Lake Tahoe, CA, July 9-14, 2023. The cochlear implant (CI) is the first neural prosthesis in widespread clinical application for restoring sound sensation and speech understanding to the severely hard-of-hearing population who have difficulties understanding speech with acoustic hearing aids. Over the past 30 years, dramatic improvements in patients' performance with these devices have been achieved and hence a wider population of patients can benefit from cochlear implants. Currently the average speech understanding score for implanted postlingually deafened adults is nearly 80% correct for sentence recognition in quiet and 50% correct in low levels of background noise. Congenitally deaf children who receive a CI prior to age 2 are achieving nearly normal rates of speech and language development. CIs can even provide significant improvement in communication for adults who have substantial residual acoustic hearing. These advances have benefitted considerably from the collective efforts of researchers in a broad array of scientific disciplines, from cellular biology, physiology, materials science, and signal processing, to linguistics and cognition. This interdisciplinary collaboration and cooperation has been fostered in large part through a series of biennial conferences, originating with a 1983 Gordon Conference. These conferences are the only forum related to CIs in which scientific research issues are the sole focus of active participants in the auditory community who contribute to moving the field forward. Even the best CI users though face significant limitations in music perception as well as speech perception in challenging listening environments. The long-term goal of CIAP is to generate cutting-edge research ideas to improve the design and function of auditory prostheses. The Specific Aims are to provide (1) a global forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest and highest quality research, (2) an atmosphere that is conducive to: disseminating new findings through scientific discussion, stimulating new lines of research, and facilitating collaborations through social networking, and (3) an opportunity for young investigators and many trainees in the field to present their work and network with established investigators. CIAP conferences use the Gordon Research Conference model of organization, with ample time for discussion within the program, unstructured time to encourage spontaneous informal discussions and brainstorming, and an isolated “retreat” location where participants spend most of their waking hours with other conference participants.