Cochlear implants:
A remarkable past and a brilliant future
Just 30 years ago cochlear implants provided little more than a sensation of sound and sound cadences. They were useful as an aid to lip reading. Now, a majority of implant users enjoy high levels of speech recognition using hearing alone; indeed, many can use the telephone without difficulty. This is a long trip in a short time, and cochlear implants are widely and correctly regarded as one of the true miracles of modern medicine.
Although great progress has been made, much remains to be done. Patients with the best results still do not hear as well as listeners with normal hearing, particularly in demanding situations such as speech presented in competition with noise or other talkers. Users of standard unilateral implants do not have much access to music and other sounds that are more complex than speech. Most importantly, speech reception scores still vary widely across patients for relatively difficult tests, such as recognition of monosyllabic words, with any of the implant systems now in widespread use.
Fortunately, major steps forward have been made recently and many other possibilities for further improvements in implant design and function are on the horizon.
In this talk, I will recount briefly the progress made during the past three decades and then present my view of the future, which could not be more positive.
Professor Blake Wilson
RTI International and
Duke University Medical Center
North Carolina, USA