ARM4CI · Evaluation of the Quality of Experience of Cochlear Implant Users Listening to Live Music Performances through Augmented Reality

Hard-of-hearing (HoH) individuals are greatly limited in their interpersonal communications leading them to social isolation and loneliness. To mitigate the communication gap, cochlear implants (CI) were invented to improve speech intelligibility. However, music perception remains severely distorted due to its innate complex acoustical properties. Since music is a ubiquitous means for socio-cultural interactions, the inability to listen to it significantly degrades the quality of life of CI users.ARM4CI aims to enable CI users to perceive and appreciate music holistically through augmented reality (AR). Its objectives include organizing a database containing multimodal data of live music performances, utilizing the database to implement an intelligent system that transforms music that will be more perceivable by CI users, and integrating it into an AR system for evaluation of the quality of experience (QoE) of CI users. ARM4CI has the potential to impact the scientific community by providing a database that enables the development of machine learning algorithms, the CI users by improving their quality of experience in music consumption, and the music industry by introducing a new paradigm of listening to live music through AR.ARM4CI will be implemented in University College Dublin under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Hines. Through this project, a two-way transfer of knowledge is achieved since it combines my experience in multimodal data gathering and analysis of music performances, Dr. Hines' experience in designing algorithms to improve speech intelligibility for HoH individuals, and UCD's capacity to host AR-driven research. The fellowship is a timely opportunity for me to achieve my career goals of securing a tenure faculty position and setting up my own research laboratory for music technology in the future.