Treatment
How is hearing loss treated？
The cochlear implant is a small, complex, electronic device that can help provide an interpretable stimulus to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing. The implant is surgically placed under the skin behind the ear.
History
Around 1790, Alessandro Volta developed the electric battery. He then placed metal rods in his own ears and connected them to a 50-volt circuit, experiencing a jolt and hearing a noise “like a thick boiling soup”.
In 1957,Djourno and Eyries made their first attempt to develop a clinical cochlear implant which turned out to be unsuccessful.
Significant advancement has taken place since then, leading to the first of 3 recipients to be implanted with Cochlear's TIKI device, a totally implantable cochlear implant in Melbourne, Australia on 5th of October 2005.
How it works？
The cochlear implant has external and internal components.
The microphone outside picks up sounds from the environment and converts the sound to electric signal. The speech processor which selectively filters sound to prioritize audible speech and sends the electrical sound signals through a thin cable to the transmitter which is a coil held in position by a magnet placed behind the external ear, and transmits the processed sound signals to the internal device which is fixed in the bone beneath the skin by electromagnetic induction.
Cochlear implant. Image courtesy of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cochlear_implant.jpg This image is in the public domain and thus free of any copyright restrictions.
The internal device includes a receiver and a stimulator. It converts the signals into electric impulses and sends them through an internal cable to an array of up to 22 electrodes thread to the cochlear. The cochlear delivers the impulses to the nerves in the scala tympani and then directly to the brain through the auditory nerve system.
A cochlear implant is very different from a hearing aid. Whereas hearing aids amplify sound and change the acoustical signal to match the degree of hearing loss, cochlear implants compensate for damaged or nonworking parts of the inner ear by passing them altogether.