Cochlear implant users have varying capacities to use temporal and spectral cues. Sound coders used in CIs generally have fixed parameters such that the extent or availability of these cues cannot be individually tuned. Even when using experimental coders in the lab, live processing often has to be interrupted when parameters are changed, or only a limited set of parameters can be trialed. The possibility to hand over control of certain sound coding parameters to the user would fulfill some of the requirements of personalized medicine.

To address these limitations, we developed a take-home CI processor based on the University of Texas CCi-MOBILE platform. Real-time Spectral and Temporal Enhanced Processing (STEP, Kovačić & James, 2022, doi:10.1007/s10162-022-00854-2) was implemented in an Android smartphone application. In this first version, the CI user is able to switch between ACE, the standard advanced combination encoder, and STEP. In addition, the modulation bandwidth can be varied continuously, for example, to control temporal voice-pitch cues. We will report representative electrode-o-grams showing the effects of varying sound coding parameters. The first author will also share his real-world experiences listening through the device. Finally, we will demonstrate how the system allows CI users to control spectral parameters precisely by assigning specific frequencies to electrodes.