My daughter has a Cochlear Implant. This is an amazing thing, as it allows her to go through life like any hearing child (more or less). In fact, with her hair down, you might not even notice that she was hearing impared.

Unless we’re swimming.

We live in Texas, and in Texas it gets really hot in the summer. If you are a kid, you swim. If you are a kid with a Cochlear Implant, you swim without it. My daughter does really well with this. She meets other hearing kids at the pool and plays with them, although she admits that it is difficult. She and I have spoken many times about how great it would be to have a fully implanted cochlear implant. If they do it with pace makers, why not cochlear implants?

Well, we all know the two main issues with this idea: what do you do about the battery and the microphone? Batteries run out of power. A typical cochlear implant battery only lasts a few days at best. Additionally, microphones work on sound pressure. If you cover the mic up by implanting it, can you still hear?

Yesterday, I saw a great article by Michael Chorost on the MIT Tecnology Review web site. The title was The Naked Ear: A fully implantable hearing aid is showing promise. In the article, Chorost talks about a new implantable hearing aid. The hearing aid implants the microphone just under the skin. This mutes the sound, so the company makes the mic more sensitive to compensate. For the battery, the company uses rechargable batteries charged with a coil (similar to the cochlear implant coils that are currently used to send signals to the implant from the processor).

Of course, there are downsides. You need to charge the battery every day, and have them surgically replaced every 5-10 years. There is also the issue of increased cost.

Still, I think this is very exciting. As fast as technology moves, it is easy for me to imagine a fully implantable cochlear implant on the market before my daughter gets married (which will be way off in the future, I hope).

According to a press release from Rutgers University today, neuroscientist Robin Davis is publishing research that may lead to breakthroughs in cochlear implant capabilities. The fundamental research in two specific cochlear proteins shows how the distribution of those proteins correlates to the speed at which neurons fire. It is proposed that future cochlear implants could actually deliver doses of the proteins directly to the cochlea. The work is to appear in the December 19th issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.