Cochlear Implant Breakthrough: No External Parts

That disk-shaped transmitter that goes outside the heads of implant wearers could soon be a thing of the past. MIT researchers are presenting a paper this week showing how they've developed a chip that could be wirelessly recharged by a cell phone with an adaptor after about eight hours of use. The new implant uses the middle ear rather than an external microphone, as implants on the market do now. Users would not have to take it off near water and there wouldn't be the concern that cochlear implant users have now over the possibility of part of the device being lost or broken or stolen. Details of the work will be presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Read more from MIT here.