HCA 210 | Health Care Innovation | Cochlear Implants |

Joseph Fortescue
12/22/2013
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In every country and culture there are people who suffer from hearing loss. Sometimes it is classified as conductive hearing loss where for some reason the sound waves are being blocked; which can usually be fixed with surgery. The majority of people who suffer from hearing loss have damage to the nerves that carry sounds to the brain. That is called sensorineural hearing loss; and there are new innovative ways to help those suffering from sensoineural hearing loss. Hearing aids were invented to help damaged nerves carry sound by amplifying the sound with a microphone. That only helps those who are hard of hearing; if you amplify sound to a deaf person they still cannot hear it. The cochlear implant however, does not amplify sound; it uses electromagnetic pulses to stimulate cells in the cochlea that activate the auditory nerve. This process bypasses the damaged nerves that receive sound waves, which for the majority of the time are the cause of hearing loss. I have heard about cochlear implants for a while now and wondered about the difference in quality of hearing after surgery. The cochlear implant picks up sound and transmits it through electromagnetic pulses so is there a possibility that the sounds get distorted in the process. Since it is not the traditional method of hearing maybe the sounds are not the same either. The patient has to go through habilitation to get used to hearing and deciphering through noises to learn how to communicate but maybe the sounds they learn aren’t the same as the ones we are hearing. That is always something that I wondered about until I read about the piezoelectric hearing implant. This innovative implant uses the ear canal’s natural acoustics to pick up sound waves so the signals that are sent to the brain are the same as