14 DAY TRIAL // Hearing is about as essential a sense as sight, which means that a lot of effort was put into helping those with hearing disabilities. Now, though, aesthetics might start to figure more into the plans of cochlear implant makers.
Cochlear implants are devices that allow deaf people to hear again, though not quite to the same extent as they would if they were truly healthy.
All of them are pretty obvious though, since they have to be attached to the back of the ear, well within sight of everyone.
Granted, it's a rare person that actually complains about this after going deaf for so long and suddenly regaining the ability to hear.
But scientists from MIT (well, really a team between Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary) decided to look into ways of making them less obtrusive anyway, and here is the result: a new chip that could lead to cochlear implants that are truly implants.
Which is to say, implants that would actually be fully buried inside the body, instead of complex devices involving an external microphone and a speech processor/power source.
MIT theorized that the new implant would use, instead of a man-made microphone, the natural microphone of the middle ear, which is usually intact in cochlear implant users.
So, it would be more like a middle ear implant, using a sensor to see when the ossicle bones move, thus generating a signal that, once sent to the chip, is converted into electric impulses.
The impulses would then go to an electrode located in the cochlea itself, which would be stimulated, thus enabling patients to hear.
In addition to the much smaller size, the new chip needs far less power than normal implants, without which it would be impossible to get it inside the body and still draw use from it. As it is, it can be charged wirelessly in about two minutes (using a charger attached to a smartphone). Not sure how long a charge lasts though.