Hearing the Light — Development of a Optical Cochlear Implant

The University of Göttingen is currently developing a cochlear implant that transmits optical instead of electrical stimuli to the auditory nerve.

Phase I / II studies are planned for 2025.

http://www.auditory-neuroscience.uni-goettingen.de/hearing_the_light_EN.html

 

I saw a video about this once. Looks very promising.

 

Yes, only if you have profound hearing loss.

 

Not necessarily. No longer is there a requirement of profound hearing loss before you meet the criteria for a CI.

 

Can you point me to any information regarding that?

 

Go and have a look on the Cochlear America site or obviously other sites like Australia etc. I'd upload it, however it is too difficult to do on my phone, sorry. The criteria is from moderate to profound hearing loss now and no longer profound hearing loss exclusively.

Essentially the criteria for candidates changed when two things occured.

1. When CIs were shown to be fairly beneficial and have good outcomes.

2. When audiologists who actually engaged in more comprehensive research identified that there tends to be multiple issues with relying solely on the audiogram to determine whether someone should get a CI.

There is now a larger body of evidence that shows that a wider cohort can benefit from obtaining CI and the testing methodology/criteria has been amended accordingly. As a result you no longer need to have profound hearing loss.

 

It really is great news. It will be wild if the results from the study show the kind of improvement over traditional CI I’d expect.

 

Yes if these devices do do the things that the developers/researchers believe that they can do then I think that there can be a real benefit from them, especially with their comparisons to normal hearing ability.