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Traditional, acoustic, hearing aids often cannot provide sufficient hearing capacity to persons with severe hearing loss. Recent advances in technology had however presented new techniques that substitute the non functional part of the auditory system and hereby create "bionic hearing". In cochlear implants (CI), an electrode array is surgically inserted into the inner ear, and feed with electrical impulses from an externally worn sound processor. The signal pattern is transferred from the array to the ganglion cells of the inner ear and further on into the auditory system in the brain where the patter is perceived as sound.

Bionic hearing is, as all hearing, a result of processes within the central nervous system. However, the signal pattern of a cochlear implant has considerable lower level of information content as compared to that of the biological ear. The effectiveness of the central auditory processes is therefore crucial for the outcome of the rehabilitative measures.

Deaf-born children are often provided with one or two cochlear implants. Contrary to persons who have lost their hearing, these children have no auditory experience and no auditory memories to facilitate the processing of the signal pattern. Intensive habilitation is therefore needed to ensure the development of purposeful hearing.

Deaf-born children with multiple functional deficits constitute a special vulnerable group with respect to the ability to make use of the input from the CI. Several factors contribute to this; some children have central processing deficits and other may have severely limited motor skills that interfere with natural exploration of vocal gestures and acoustic effects of motor activities.

Findings in the literature suggest that motor actions linked to musical activities may have profound effects on organization of neural networks, and may promote skills that are fundamental for a multitude of mental processes such as concentration, motor control, attention span and self regulation.

A concept for auditory stimulation through motor activities has been developed, based on gesture sensors and various controllable sound models. Preliminary findings are discussed in relation to literature on hearing, motor control and development children with multiple functional deficits.