A PDA-based Research Platform for Cochlear Implants

Currently researchers interested in developing new signal processing algorithms for commercially available cochlear implants must rely on coding these algorithms in low-level assembly language. We propose a personal digital assistant (PDA) based research platform for developing and testing in real-time new signal processing strategies for cochlear implants. Software development can be done either in C or in LabVIEW. The C implementation can be further optimized using Intel´s primitive routines. In this paper, we report on the real-time implementation of a 16-channel noise-band vocoder algorithm, which is a similar algorithm used in commercially available implant processors. We further report on EEG recordings on the PDA acquired through a compact-flash data acquisition card.