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Pinhead-Sized Implant Could Replace Hearing Aids
An anonymous reader writes "Depending on the level of hearing impairment, conventional aids may not be good enough and a hearing implant is the only option. Until now the required surgery to fit them has taken several hours. However, that is about to change. A new implant that can be fitted with outpatient surgery has been developed consisting of a 1.2mm electro-acoustic transducer, which is positioned at the so-called 'round window,' which is where the middle and inner ear connect. It then produces amplified mechanical vibrations that stimulate the auditory nerve. Even though the transducer is tiny, it can reach volumes of up to 120 decibels."
you can hear a pin drop
Apple will release it standard with the iPhone 7
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cochlear implants are required for some deaf patients, and those are the implants that require surgery. This PR bulletin from the Fraunhoffer institute is very cool, but it's like the retinal implants for vision, actually it's not even up to the level of retinal implants which are at least currently being tested. This implant system only has had its individual parts created.
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Those individual components have not yet been put together to make a full hearing aid. This is just a proof of concept or feasibility study thus far. They still have to select the materials that will be used for the long term implantation. An assembled version may be ready next year. As for the extremely small size claimed, that small size is just for the "electroacoustic transducer" (the details in the PDF file says it's a piezoelectric micro-actuator). And the round window is already the part of the ear that bulges in and out as the oval window accepts input from the stapedius. So this adds pressure on the other side of the fluid column. Experts are currently testing a first working prototype in the laboratory. Results have been positive to date. "The individual components of the hearing aid have all been developed. The next step is to optimize and assemble them," says Kaltenbacher. The implant must measure up to high requirements: the material must be encased so the body tolerates it and it has to remain stable over long periods -- after all, hearing aid implants should last at least ten years. The optimized individual components should be ready by June of this year; testing of the overall system is planned for 2014.
What? All I hear is ringing! ;(
Having severe hearing loss in one ear, this is very interesting to me, but honestly I would rather wait for results on current studies looking into regenerating damaged hair cells before pursuing this. The headline "Regaining Proper Hearing at Last" is in my opinion not quite correct; from what I can tell, they're just tickling whatever cells are left to stimulate harder than before, as opposed to restoring the full capability of input. Then you've still got signal processing issues like phase discrepancies, gaps in frequency coverage that need to be made up by transposing or saturating neighbor/harmonic frequencies, and all sorts of related hairy business. A big advantage here is you can break out the processing to a box with beefier DSP than you could fit in a BTE device, with batteries that last longer.
Definitely a step in the right direction, and by far better than similar solutions in the past, but still a long way from perfect.
Almost all other areas, technology has driven down the costs of electronics. Hearing aids still cost an arm and a leg (or maybe a kidney) and it doesn't make any sense. Why hasn't China flooded the market with cheap, high quality hearing aids yet?
Especially when it was pointed out to him that this was a different kind of pinhead.
I am officially gone from
Even though the transducer is tiny, it can reach volumes of up to 120 decibels.
We've found our next form of torture.
....of Zippy crammed in my cochlea and shouting non-sequiturs at my eardrum.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
120 dB increase? Has anyone ever seen an old guy scream, and rip his hearing aid out due to it mis-amplifying the wrong sounds?!?!
This is insane. The patient MUST have a hard OFF switch.
I could use that. :)
Pretty much ANY transducer can do that... The key is the distance at which that rating is measured. For every halving of distance, you gain 6 dB additional output. Take a quiet 80 dB speaker at 1 meter, move it to 1 cm, and you've got 120 dB SPL. It's trivial to generate 120 dB SPL from an existing hearing aid - or this new unit - when it's placed in the auditory canal.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I see no indication of what frequencies this thing will be able to produce; anyone have any ideas? Presumably, with its size, any difficulty would be in the lower portion of the spectrum, but I'm not really terribly familiar with transducers of this nature.
Even lacking a proper coverage of the range of frequencies of human hearing, though, it's always exciting to see progress!
The article certainly lacks a clear definition of what is meant by "it can output volumes of up to 120 decibels". I assume they mean something equivalent to a 120 dB SPL sound measured at the entrance to the ear canal.
Here's the thing. It's an implant placed on the round window of the cochlea. So we're talking acoustic/mechanical coupling of solids, not spherical wave radiation. Talking about placing this unit in the ear canal doesn't make sense and implies that you didn't RTFS...say it isn't so , Slashdot.
Also, even when talking about hearing aid receivers in an ear canal, you're not talking about free-field acoustics, but acoustics inside a squishy, non-uniform tube-like cavity. So no, you can't just move it closer to double the level.
Why hasn't China flooded the market with cheap, high quality hearing aids yet?
I imagine that more of the cost of a hearing aid is for costs related to FDA or other regulatory approval (and economic rents that approved manufacturers collect for the fact that devices their have been approved) than for actual manufacturing costs.
I hope the plans to add a Bluetooth receiver are already on the way. An implantable Codec style earphone is much more welcome than those goofy Bluetooth headsets used nowadays.
I immediately Ctrl+F'd this discussion and was surprised that nobody had mentioned Hellraiser.
about how this will further erode deaf culture and all that BS.
It's like people complaining that the toilet destroyed the culture of throwing your shit and piss in the street.
Q. "What kind is it?"
A. "Quarter to four."
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
The device attaches to the round window. It might someday be part of a hearing solution that could offer new hope to those with middle ear hearing loss (simply because it bypasses the middle ear). The cochlear implant is different. The cochlear implant bypasses the ear. The cochlear implant delivers a direct electrical signal through a fine strand of several electrodes set onto the auditory nerves. It sends a signal from a external receiver through an antenna directly to the auditory cortex without using the original pathways - ears. In contrast, this devices vibrates the round window .. a lot.
Not quite direct to the auditory cortex, there are a lot of nerves and synapses between the auditory nerve and the auditory cortex. But this is just from someone who's been studying the peripheral auditory pathways for the past however long, so I may care a little more about those details than most :-) But, for example, there is a device called a auditory midbrain implant, that stimulates higher up in the signal pathway, but still far from cortex. Because of all the computations happening along the pathway, the differences are pretty huge when you start skipping stages.
But I wish I could mod you up for pointing out why this is very different from what "cochlear implant" means today. Not that anyone else is reading these comments anymore; I've gotten the impression that Slashdot has an attention span of about a day.