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August
2006
In the
past year, my lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
completed work on a bionic-ear processor that does the job of the
digital-signal processor, is small enough to be implanted, and could run
on a 2-gram battery needing a wireless recharge only every two weeks. As
the best batteries currently available can be recharged about 1000 times,
this device is the first to permit 30-year operation without surgery to
replace the battery. Last year, a deaf woman replaced her conventional
processor with ours, though it was not implanted, and afterward she could
understand speech easily and well.
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