September 2011 - Cochlear Implant
Mapping Online
May 2011 -
Evaluation of noise reduction technologies in
a contemporary cochlear implant system
April 2011 -
Implantable Microphone
Brings Implantable Cochlear Implant Closer
February 2011 - Use Your Smartphone to Adjust your
Cochlear Implant
February 2011 - Single cochlear implant helps you hear
in BOTH ears
September 2010 - Single Cochlear Implant Provides
Sound for Both Ears
September 2010 - Comparison of Bimodal and Bilateral
Cochlear Implant Users
July 2010 - New cochlear implant could improve outcomes
for patients
November 2009 - NFMI Technology Promises Wireless CIs
August 2009 - New Software Promises
Better Speech Recognition for Hearing Aids and Cochlear Implants
August 2009 - Study Aims to Improve Cochlear Implant
Processing
August 2009 - New CI Software
Improves Speech Recognition
November 2008 - Infrared Light May Improve Cochlear
Implants
October 2008 - New software helps improve cochlear implant
tuning process
March 2008 -
Doctor Maps CI from Halfway Around the World
March 2008 -
Should you consider upgrading the INTERNAL
CI components?
March 2008 - Researcher Aims to Improve CI
Performance in Noise
December 2007 - Rutgers Discovery Offer
Potential for Improved Cochlear Implants
October 2007 - Aculight developing optical
cochlear implant
September 2007 - Cochlear Implant Work at UW
January 2007 - NIDCD-funded Research Explores
Use of Laser to Stimulate Auditory Nerve
June 2006 - UI Cochlear Implant Center
Contributes to CI Advances
April 2006 - Professor
developing PDA-CI Interface
February 2006 - New
CI Electrode Array Technology Promises Improved Hearing
February 2005 - Dr. Robert V.
Shannon of the House Ear Institute discusses the factors affecting
speech recognition for CI users. This is a VERY interesting article!
August 2003 - Interested in the latest thinking
regarding how a person's hearing history affects their speech
understanding with a CI? Then check out Dr.
Shannon's workshop from the SHHH convention.
June
2003 - Is an analog CI superior to a digital CI?
April
2000 - Dr. Bruce Gantz of the University of Iowa announced an
experimental high frequency cochlear implant
that operates only on the high frequencies, which is the area in which
many people have the majority of their hearing loss. The residual low
frequency hearing loss is unaffected. February 2000 - The cochlear implant workshop presented
by the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) in February
2000 included a
rather technical cochlear implant discussion by Robert Shannon PhD, who
is Director of the Auditory Implant Research Laboratory at the House Ear Institute.
Here's an article summarizing the technical
information.
More on this and related
topics
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2012
Unlike nontonal languages, music is highly
dependent on accurate perception of pitch, a property related to the
fundamental frequency of sound. Pitch functions as a basic building
block of music and forms the foundation for musical melody, harmony, and
scale. Impairments in pitch perception therefore translate into broad
deficits for many different aspects of music perception. Pitch
resolution is typically poor for CI users. Unlike normal hearing
listeners who can detect a one percent or less difference for
frequencies up to 4 kHz, CI users can only detect a 10 percent to 25
percent difference for frequencies up to 0.5 kHz and have much greater
difficulties for frequencies over 0.5 kHz. (J Acoust Soc Am
2005;118[1]:338.) These pitch deficits can be largely attributed to the
technological limitations of the device. Pitch is finely encoded in a
normal cochlea by the place of stimulation along the cochlea (i.e.,
place-pitch), so that the apical end corresponds to lower pitches and
the basal end to higher ones and the rate at which the auditory nerve
fibers fire (i.e., rate-pitch) affects the pitch, or in other words, a
faster rate elicits a higher pitch. These two mechanisms of pitch
encoding in electric hearing, however, are severely degraded. Some 3,500
inner hairs cells convey finely tuned frequency information to the
auditory nerve fibers based on their location along the cochlea in
place-pitch for normal hearing. Comparatively, the implanted electrode
array contains only eight to 24 electrodes that are meant to replace the
frequency specificity of thousands of inner hair cells.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2011
Modern multi-electrode cochlear implants have
restored partial hearing to more than 200,000 deaf people worldwide today.
About half of these are children, with many of them having now developed
language capabilities on par with their normal hearing peers.1 For cochlear
implants to achieve this remarkable level of success, they not only had to
compete against other devices such as tactile aids and hearing aids, they
also had to overcome doubt from the mainstream and deaf communities in their
early years of development. All contemporary cochlear implants use similar
signal processing that extracts temporal envelope information from a limited
number of spectral bands, and delivers these envelopes successively to 12-22
electrodes implanted in the cochlea. As a result, these implants produce
similarly good speech performance: 70-80 percent sentence recognition in
quiet, which allows an average cochlear implant user to carry on a
conversation over the telephone. Interestingly, though, sentence recognition
in quiet has essentially remained at this same level since 1994.
Full Story~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2011
Despite these advances, many cochlear implant users
continue to experience substantial difficulty with speech recognition in
noisy environments. In particular, recent studies have shown that speech
understanding decreases by 30 to 60 percentage points when performance in
quiet is compared with performance at commonly-encountered signal-to-noise
ratios ranging from +4 and +10 dB.8-11 As a result, cochlear implant
manufacturers invest considerable resources into the development of
technologies designed to improve speech perception in noise. For example,
the newly-introduced Cochlear Nucleus 5 cochlear implant system possesses
several features that are intended to improve speech understanding in noisy
environments
Full Story~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
February 2011
Marnie McCarthy used to think her three teenage sons
were pleasantly quiet. But then she heard them properly for the first time
and realised just how noisy they really are. Until six months ago, Marnie
had never heard the voices of her boys, aged 17, 14 and 12. Nor had she
heard the sound of birdsong, laughter or a ringing telephone. That's because
Marnie, now 45, was born almost totally deaf. She wore hearing aids, but
her hearing loss had been becoming increasingly worse over the years. Even
with the aids, she could hear only the very loudest sounds. Hearing in two
ears allows people to hear speech better and means a patient can hear where
a sound is coming from. And because the devices amplify all noise, it was
almost impossible for her to pick out voices, even when she was in a quiet
environment. Yet she is now able to hear her sons' voices, along with a host
of other `new' sounds, thanks to a recent technological breakthrough - a
single cochlear implant that helps you hear in both ears.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
September 2010
Objectives: Despite excellent performance in speech
recognition in quiet, most cochlear implant users have great difficulty with
speech recognition in noise, music perception, identifying tone of voice,
and discriminating different talkers. This may be partly due to the pitch
coding in cochlear implant speech processing. Most current speech processing
strategies use only the envelope information; the temporal fine structure is
discarded. One way to improve electric pitch perception is to use residual
acoustic hearing via a hearing aid on the nonimplanted ear (bimodal
hearing). This study aimed to test the hypothesis that bimodal users would
perform better than bilateral cochlear implant users on tasks requiring good
pitch perception.
Full Story~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
November 2009
The most interesting of the products that they
demoed was a cochlear implant where the left and right ears implants could
communicate with each other using very short range wireless technology.
Cochlear implants are put inside deaf people's skulls to interface directly
to nerves. Gradually the deaf person (usually a child) can start to hear as
the brain works out what to do with those weird electrical signals that
suddenly started to appear. I have a friend whose daughter was born deaf and
has a cochlear implant and the transformation is nothing short of
incredible. But putting two implants, one for each ear, and having them be
able to communicate with each other, makes for even better comprehension.
With an inductive interface too, it is possible to use a small box that
takes Bluetooth and communicates inductively with the implants, allowing
deaf people to use the phone or listen to music much more easily (it's too
power hungry just to put a bluetooth receiver in the implant).
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
November 2008
Infrared light can stimulate neurons in the inner
ear as precisely as sound waves, a discovery that could lead to better
cochlear implants for deaf people. A healthy inner ear uses hair cells that
respond to sound to stimulate neurons that send signals to the brain. But
hair cells can be destroyed by disease or injury, or can contain defects at
birth, leading to deafness. In such cases, cochlear implants can directly
stimulate neurons. The hearing provided by today's implants is good enough
to enable deaf children to develop speech skills that are remarkably similar
to hearing children's. Implant users still find it tough to appreciate
music, communicate in a noisy environment and understand tonal languages
like Mandarin, however. That's because the implants use only 20 or so
electrodes, a small number compared to the 3000-odd hair cells in a healthy
ear. More sources of stimulation should make hearing clearer but more
electrodes cannot be packed in because tissue conducts electricity, so
signals from different electrodes would interfere. In contrast, laser light
targets nerves more precisely and doesn't spread, which could allow an
implant to transmit more information to the neurons.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
March 2008
Through the power of Internet technology, medical
experts in New York have switched on an inner-ear device, allowing a man in
Uganda to hear for the first time in two years. Activating the device from
halfway around the world is a first, and highlights a trailblazing way in
which the growing realm of telemedicine - conducting medical procedures from
remote locations - can enhance the lives of people in struggling nations.
Full Story
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March 2008
YOU could call it the upgrader's dilemma. When it
comes to buying a new mobile phone, computer or DVD player, should you buy
the latest and greatest model now, since it offers new features that your
old model lacks? Or should you wait for the next version of the technology
that will be along next year and threatens to make today's gear seem
suddenly old-fashioned? Now imagine that upgrading the item in question
requires you to have surgery. That, in a nutshell, is the predicament that
people with cochlear implants may soon be in. As many as 120,000 people are
now thought to have had their hearing restored by these revolutionary
devices, which turn sound waves into electrical signals that stimulate the
auditory nerves in the ear via an implanted electrode, and are perceived as
sound. But several new developments promise big improvements to the
technology in the coming years, so existing users could face tough choices
as they have to decide whether to undergo surgery to reap the benefits.
Full Story