The promises and pitfalls of Neurotech

Neurotech attempts to "connect human brains to machines, computers and mobile phones." The goal is to develop therapies for neurological diseases and mental illnesses. Examples include cochlear implants for the deaf and hard of hearing, and deep-brain stimulators that assist people with Parkinson’s disease to regain functional mobility. But there is a problem with this advancing technology. As Scientific American puts it:

There are no widely accepted regulations or guardrails yet when it comes to neurotech’s development or deployment. We need them—we need them bad. We must have principles and policies around neurotech, technology safeguards, and national and international regulations.

Read more here.

A totally implantable cochlear implant

Med-El says it is making progress in developing a fully implantable cochlear implant. The Austrian company reports the first such surgery in Europe was successfully performed at Liège University Hospital in Belgium. It is likely to take several years before Med-El can bring the new device to the market. The online publication Hearing Health and Technology Matters magazine recently named Med-El “Innovator of the Year.” You can see a video about the awards below. You can read more about the new procedure in a press release from Med-El here.

Research on better hearing with implants in noisy environments

An Australian researcher says he has developed a new way to predict how to tweak cochlear implants for recipients in order to more quickly improve their hearing in noisy situations. Greg Watkins, who holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, believes the result of his findings might lead to personalized implants. Watkins himself has two cochlear implants. He says:

credit: University of Sydney 

Despite their successes, there remain areas such as the cochlear implant's performance in noisy environments where a personalised approach in taking the sound from the environment and translating that into electrical stimulation could conceivably make a world of difference.

His findings are published in the Ear and Hearing journal. Read more about the research from the University of Sydney here.

Cochlear earnings fall after litigation loss

The largest cochlear implant maker, Cochlear Ltd, saw its earnings fall after losing a patent lawsuit in the U.S. The coronavirus pandemic also hurt the company's revenue for the year. The Australian company reported a net loss of more than $283 million for 2019-20 after reporting a profit of $276 million the previous year. The patent litigation was filed by the Alfred E Mann Foundation for Scientific Research and Advanced Bionics. The company said the jury award was out of proportion to the feature's value.

Implant Activated Remotely

A toddler in England has just had her cochlear implant activated for the first time during a remote telemedicine session between her house and the clinical team. Read more about it on Medgadget here or watch the video about the procedure below.

Implant contest winner from Washington

image from Ideas4Ears contest video

An 8-year-old Washington state girl won the grand prize in an international contest sponsored by her cochlear implant maker, Med-El. Kenzi Cayton and her mom made a short video with her mom which was chosen from the 171 ideas submitted by more than 2000 children in nearly 30 countries,  Her idea for the  Ideas4Ears competition is to create an app that allows people to change the "skins" on their implants by clicking a button. Watch her video submission here. Read the press release about the contest here.

What Do Cochlear Implants And Hearing Aids Sound Like?

Science Friday has a lesson for middle school students about how hearing aids and cochlear implants including sample recordings of: "..what it’s like to hear sound through a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. Unless you wear one of these devices, it is impossible to know exactly what it is like to experience sound through them. In fact, people who have normal hearing in one ear but wear a cochlear implant in the other ear say that these simulations sound very different from how they hear sounds with their implant." The sample sounds are posted here.

Cochlear implant recall

Advanced Bionics is recalling some defective cochlear implants that were never implanted. The company will shell out more than $50 million in the recall. The recall involves the HiRes Ultra and Ultra 3D cochlear implant devices. There have been reports of decreased hearing performance by users in some of those cochlear implant devices. Read more here.

Deaf doctoral student

Alexis Nye is deaf and working toward her Ph.D. in audiology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Born profoundly deaf, she was diagnosed at the age of six months. At the age of two years of age, she received her first cochlear implant and a second at age 16. Read more about her from the News & Record here or watch a video report about her from last year.

Three of Wyoming couple's kids undergo implant procedures

Three children of Jackie and Chris Isenberger went through cochlear implant procedures at the same time at Children's Hospital in Colorado. The parents defend their decision in an article published by The Denver Channel here.

Deafness in Three Movements

A new documentary about deafness premiered on HBO last night. Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements is the story of Jonas Brodsky who began losing his hearing at the age of two like his grandmother. Only in Jonas case, his parents had the choice of giving him a cochlear implant. Read more about the film here or watch the trailer below.

$2 Million Grant Goes to Cochlear Implant Research

A National Institutes of Health grant of $2 million will be used by a researcher at USC toward a "project aimed at helping the formerly deaf with cochlear implants regain their appreciation for music." Ray Goldsworthy (who uses a CI himself) will study:

The role pitch perception plays in music comprehension. The ability to determine pitch — to distinguish if one sound is higher or lower than the other — is severely limited in once-deaf people with cochlear implants and a big reason that music is hard for them to hear. Goldsworthy plans to help subjects regain this ability through training software he has developed. He will also investigate new ways of encoding improved pitch into the electrical stimulation patterns of the cochlear implant — this stimulation is how sound is recognized — and use brain imaging to understand the changes in the brain that occur with pitch training.

Read more from USC here.

Docu shows deafness as a gift, not as a disability

A new documentary about hearing loss takes a look at Beethoven, filmmaker’s son, and her deaf parents. Irene Taylor Brodsky first introduced her parents in her 2007 film Hear and Now. A Washington Post reviewer calls Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements a "moving and thought-provoking film." Read the review here. Below is a video interview of Brodsky.

Cochlear implants for one-sided hearing loss

A research team looked at whether cochlear implants could help people with hearing loss in one ear. WRAL-TV has a video report.

NBC Show Episode on Cochlear Implants

image from NBC video

In a recent episode of the NBC show New Amsterdam (titled Happy Place) a deaf patient with a cochlear implant wants it removed. The patient is overwhelmed by sounds and upset over the drift it has caused in her closest relationship. Watch it here.

Implant just in time for Wedding

A Baltimore teacher got a cochlear implant to restore his hearing last week—just in time for his wedding. David Alianiello works with deaf students in Baltimore's public school system. He told People Magazine, "It was the first time I had ever heard clapping. It was fun to be able to experience the different sounds." Read the full story here or watch a video from WBAL-TV below.

Implant Stolen

A mother had part of her son's cochlear implant stolen. It was inside Kimberly Blodgett's purse when she dropped off her children at daycare. KFOR-TV has a video report.

The Downsides and Challenges of Cochlear Implants

An opinion piece in the New York Times takes on the issue of cochlear implants. Writing professor Sara Novic cautions:

Expecting an implant to cure deafness or magically generate speech is to await the moment the hammer will fly out of one’s hand and build a house on its own. The value of the tool lies only in the skill of its user, and for the cochlear implant user, that skill is learned with much effort. To suggest otherwise is to give a disingenuous prognosis to potential patients and their parents, and discounts the hard work successful C.I. users do to communicate in a way the hearing world deems acceptable.

Read her article here.

NYT advocates for Implants in Health article

A controversial New York pediatric audiology consultant and speech-language pathologist is quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Children identified with hearing loss at birth and fitted with technology in the first weeks of life blend in so well with everyone else that people don’t realize there are so many deaf children." Jane R. Madell claims, “Eighty-five percent of such children are successfully mainstreamed.” That's a figure that many would dispute. She helped produce a documentary about it called “The Listening Project.” Read more of the New York Times article here. Don't miss the comment section. There are opinions from a wide variety of people including a professor of Deaf education at Boston University. He writes:

This article talks about cochlear implants as a panacea, without acknowledging the tremendous risk that a child will not learn a spoken language at all. I am disappointed that the Times would publish something so misleading.

But other commenters defend the article and Madell's perspective. Below is a trailer for the documentary.

A study on brain tumors and cochlear implants

Researchers in Sweden say they have found no evidence to support the idea that brain tumors are more likely in cochlear implant patients. That was a concern raised by a previous case but the scientists say in their study "The number of brain tumors observed was well within the numbers expected from national incidence figures." You can access the study here.