Cochlear Implants

I've spoken to people about cochlear implants a lot lately. Its the first sense that we've created an FDA approved implant for. They are relatively new, but over 100,000 people as of 2005 have them. As soon as a human sense is subject to the exponential curve of all technology, one can just imagine the potential. These are by no means a perfect replacement for normal hearing - yet! But as our understanding of how the normal signals a human ear sends to the auditory nerve grows, implants will eventually become better than a human ear. One could build in telephony technology for cell phone replacement. Why not just have a wireless computer connection for virtual reality? I wrote a blog about retinal implants currently in trials a month or so ago - http://climbingthecurve.blogspot.com/2006/10/silicon-retina-implants.html.

Here is a link to National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) discussing cochlear implants in case you would like more information.

http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/coch.asp

Costs
According to the American Academy of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS), a cochlear implant is more expensive than a hearing aid, with "the total cost of a cochlear implant including evaluation, surgery, the device, and rehabilitation is around $40,000. Most insurance companies provide benefits that cover the cost. (This is true whether or not the device has received FDA clearance or is still in trial.)"

http://www.entnet.org/healthinfo/ears/cochlear-implant.cfm


Here is an interesting segment from Wikipedia about efficacy of these devices:

Efficacy
A cochlear implant will not cure deafness or hearing impairment, but is a prosthetic substitute for hearing. Some recipients find them very effective, others somewhat effective and some feel overall worse off with the implant than without. For people already functional in spoken language who lose their hearing, cochlear implants can be a great help in restoring functional comprehension of speech, especially if they have only lost their hearing for a short time.

British Member of Parliament Jack Ashley received a cochlear implant in 1994 at age 70 after 25 years of deafness, and reported that he has no trouble speaking to people he knows one on one, even on the telephone, although he might have difficulty with a new voice or with a busy conversation, and still had to rely to some extent on lipreading. He described the robotic sound of human voices perceived through the cochlear implant as "a croaking dalek with laryngitis". Even modern cochlear implants have at most 24 electrodes to replace the 16,000 delicate hair cells that are used for normal hearing. However, the sound quality delivered by a cochlear implant is often good enough that many users do not have to rely on speech-reading (lipreading). Rush Limbaugh, U.S. talk radio show host, says that everything sounds normal except that he cannot pick out the melody of new music that he had not heard prior to becoming deaf.

Adults who have grown up deaf often find the implants ineffective or irritating because their brain is unable to interpret sound after such a long period of time. Some who were orally educated and used amplifying hearing aids have been more successful with cochlear implants, as use of the hearing aid functioned to maintain perception of sound.

For small children, there have been mixed results. Almost all children with implants hear quite well with a cochlear implant, but for a rare few, the auditory nerve is unable to be stimulated. Patients without a viable auditory nerve are usually identified during the candidacy process. Fewer than 1% of deaf individuals have a missing or damaged auditory nerve, which today can be treated with an Auditory Brainstem Implant. Recent research has suggested that children and adults can benefit from bilateral cochlear implants in order to aid in sound localization and speech understanding. (See Offeciers et. al. 2005)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant