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Although unilateral cochlear implants generally provide good speech understanding under quiet conditions, patients with unilateral cochlear implants frequently report difficulty in understanding speech in the presence of background noise and difficulty in localizing the source of sound. Since these two listening functions require binaural hearing in normal hearing individuals, there has been a growing interest in bilateral cochlear implants as intervention type for people with severe-to-profound bilateral hearing loss. This study investigated the outcomes of bilateral cochlear implants in all the adult recipients of the Pretoria Cochlear Implant Program. All the subjects with BCIs were asked to choose a significant other person to participate in the study. All the subjects (i.e. subjects with BCIs and their significant other people) were asked to participate in a semi-structured interview and to fill out a researcher-generated questionnaire. The subjects with BCIs also underwent audiometric testing. The majority of the subjects with BCIs were found to demonstrate improved ability to understand speech in the presence of background noise and, to some extent, in their ability to localize sound sources. As both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to determine the outcomes, it could be demonstrated that the majority of adult bilateral cochlear implant recipients gain from the auditory benefits in everyday listening situations. The majority of subjects and their significant other people conferred that their improved auditory skills allow them to be more participative in social, cultural, and other activities, which add to the quality of their lives. / Dissertation (MCommunication Pathology)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / Unrestricted

User experience with public products needs special attention considering the specific context. Different from other consumer or personal products that users own, public products do not belong to the user / they are shared with and used in front of other people. Thus, different concerns and problems are incorporated affecting the user experiences. This thesis dwells on the effects of presence of other people on user-public product interaction. The relationships between social context, users&rsquo / feelings, and task performances constitute the basis of the thesis. These relationships were investigated by consulting to the literature, but mainly by conducting three empirical studies. All these studies revealed that the presence of other people affects the users&rsquo / feelings and task performances greatly.

The work deals with individual sources of positive relationship to other people in the frame of mainly psychological, but also ethical and philosophical data. It is composed of five thematic chapters. The first four thematic chapters include knowledge about sense of human being, positive relationship of a person to his/her own life, relationship of a person to himself/herself, relationship of a person to other people; if the man loves himself, he is satisfied with himself and impresses friendly and harmonically on his surroundings too. He is social, friendly and he gets on well with the others. Next to it compromises thinking about friendship as a positive attitude to other person, which makes joy, sense of fellowship and protects human life from falls into darkness and suffering; relationship of a person to some other person raises hopes and backing in insecure human life. In the fifth part there is a main cogitation from {\clq}qroots{\crq}q of relationship of a person to other people and aims at beneficial findings in the frame of personal views and positions.