Tone selection for cochlear implants using peak-finding and frequency bin overlap

The Advanced Bionics cochlear implant devices employ a method of allocating static frequency bins to electrodes based on the natural tonotopic organization of the cochlea. Many studies show that there is a significant frequency-to-place mismatch in many subjects, but that over time the brain adjusts to these mismatches. Also, most of the tonal information in human speech is present in the lower end of the frequency spectrum, where there are few frequency bins and electrodes available to represent this information. Here, adjustments to the frequency bin allocation algorithm used in the crowdsourced CI Hackathon code are made to allow a more accurate representation of the original signal in the lower registers. A peak-finding and selecting method is used to find significant peaks regardless of frequency bin, then bins are overlapped to allow more accurate representation of tones near the borders between channels and peaks which may be near to each other.