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Concept
Cochlear implant
Summary
A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted neuroprosthesis that provides a person who has moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss with sound perception. With the help of therapy, cochlear implants may allow for improved speech understanding in both quiet and noisy environments. A CI bypasses acoustic hearing by direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Through everyday listening and auditory training, cochlear implants allow both children and adults to learn to interpret those signals as speech and sound.
The implant has two main components. The outside component is generally worn behind the ear, but could also be attached to clothing, for example, in young children. This component, the sound processor, contains microphones, electronics that include digital signal processor (DSP) chips, battery, and a coil that transmits a signal to the implant across the skin. The inside component, the actual implant, has a coil to receive signals, electronics, and an array of electrodes which is placed into the cochlea, which stimulate the cochlear nerve.
The surgical procedure is performed under general anesthesia. Surgical risks are minimal and most individuals will undergo outpatient surgery and go home the same day. However, some individuals will experience dizziness, and on rare occasions, tinnitus or facial nerve bruising.
From the early days of implants in the 1970s and the 1980s, speech perception via an implant has steadily increased. More than 200,000 people in the United States had received a CI through 2019. Many users of modern implants gain reasonable to good hearing and speech perception skills post-implantation, especially when combined with lipreading. One of the challenges that remain with these implants is that hearing and speech understanding skills after implantation show a wide range of variation across individual implant users. Factors such as age of implantation, parental involvement and education level, duration and cause of hearing loss, how the implant is situated in the cochlea, the overall health of the cochlear nerve, but also individual capabilities of re-learning are considered to contribute to this variation.
Official source
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