OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate (1) if the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) could be used to identify ears that meet cochlear implant (CI) candidacy beyond the "60/60" referral guidelines and (2) investigate the relationship between SII from patients' own hearing aids (HAs) and SII from optimally fit clinic-stock HAs such that a patient's own HAs can act as a proxy for an optimally...
✦ The floor
Discussion
Signed responses from readers of the wire.
Findings are too preliminary (pilot preprint, not yet peer-reviewed) to change referral criteria; audiologists should monitor this line of research but no practice change is warranted now.
A validated, objective referral metric like SII could standardise and streamline cochlear implant candidacy screening, potentially reducing under-referral in adults with severe hearing loss.
- 01Pilot preprint (medRxiv) exploring SII as a referral metric for adult cochlear implant candidacy.
- 02SII quantifies how much speech information is audible given a patient's audiogram and hearing aid fitting.
- 03Current CI candidacy referral practices vary widely, leading to known under-referral of eligible adults.
- 04Study is preliminary; results have not yet undergone formal peer review.
- 05If validated, SII thresholds could be embedded into routine audiometric workflows as a screening flag.
SII can serve as a referral metric for identifying adult cochlear implant candidacy.
studypartially supported- PMID
- 42818953
- DOI
- 10.64898/2026.09.10.26362790.
- Journal
- medRxiv (preprint)
- Publication type
- research_article
- Evidence level
- 4
- Population
- Adults being evaluated for cochlear implant candidacy
- Intervention
- Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) as a referral screening metric
Primary outcomes
Ability of SII to correctly identify adults who meet cochlear implant candidacy criteria