Choosing a Cochlear Implant?

sydsavage asks: "My mom, who is profoundly deaf, has finally qualified for a cochlear implant. She is having the procedure done at the University of Minnesota, and is scheduled for surgery in early March. The doctors have left it up to her to choose between two different implants. The differences between them are highly technical, and well above her level of comprehension. So she decided to ask her geek son to take a look at the differing technologies. Unfortunately, I'm a systems administrator, not an audio engineer or signal processing guru, and reading up on the technologies made this fact blaringly obvious to me. About the best I can tell her is one has more accessories available, as any good geek could ascertain. While this may have an impact on her decision, at the end of the day, she just wants to be able to hear better. Are there any slashdot readers with first or second hand experience with these two devices? Any signal processing engineers that would like to weigh in on the different technologies involved?"

"The two implants that are available to her are the Clarion, manufactured by Advanced Bionics, and the Nucleus, made by the Australian firm Cochlear.

The Nucleus system is the one with more bells in whistles, such as the ability to interface to FM systems for hearing impaired that are found in museums, auditoriums and theaters. It can also plug into an audio out jack of a tv, stereo or computer. It also has a built in 'tele-coil' for use with phones that are design to work with hearing aids.

My mother and I would both like to say thank you in advance for your help in making this life changing decision."

Comments

Clinical Evidence

[Jon Peterson]

Hi,

I wouldn't worry too much about how they work. Lots of treatments help people every day, without the doctors even knowing how they work! I'd try to find out about any proper clinical trials done - that's the best starting point for evaluating the options. Unfortunately, I've no idea what proper research has been done in this area, but I suggest you start hunting around - I'm sure there'll be info out there on the net.

Here's one starting point:

http://www.geocities.com/cicentral/ci_comparison .h tml

The key thing is to place little credence in personal testimonies and theories. By theories I mean claims of the type 'Because our device has a foo, it will cause less irritating bar'. Assuming you know nothing about the medicine and technology involved, such claims sound perfectly reasonable, but remember they are actually as useful as claims like 'Because Intel processors run at a higher clock speed, tasks like word processing become easier', or even 'Because we use XML, our software is more intelligent'. To a non computer literate person, such claims sound reasonable.

Personal testimonies are valuable, but remember how different one human is to another. It's very tempting in a sea of uncertain research to latch on to someone saying 'My aunt Maud had a type one device for 3 years, and it caused all sorts of problems - but now she's on a type 2 device it's much better'. That's effectively a single datum, and in the larger picture it doesn't mean much. Of course once you have enough of them, then it means more...

When reading info on the net about this stuff, ALWAYS look for references (citations of journal articles etc) to back up any claims. Be suitable wary of 'expert opinion' - Medical experts as just as biased as computer experts - and think how many of those say things that you think are rubbish!

If you are really serious about this kind of research, the US Govt. provides an excellent resource:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

Good luck with your hunt!