What’s a Cochlear implant?
A Cochlear implant is the only medical procedure capable of partially restoring a human sense - hearing.
Specifically, a cochlear implant is an electronic device designed to improve sound perception and speech understanding in profoundly deaf children and adults that may get minimal or no benefit from the use of conventional hearing aids. Hearing aids usually have a very limited capacity to improve speech understanding in profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing people because their tiny hair cells inside the inner ear (cochlea) are either too damaged or completely absent, therefore, the hearing-aid amplified sound can not adequately be transmitted to the brain.
A cochlear implant makes up for the damaged or lacking hair cells, and stimulates the acoustic nerve directly.
A cochlear implant system has some external components – a microphone, a sound and auricular processor- It also has some internal parts that are implanted through a surgical procedure and are not visible from the outside – the implant itself.
The external components capture environmental sounds as well as speech and music, and then they process all these sounds so that they can be transmitted through the skin into the implant. Then, the implant passes all the signals through an electrode array, where they’re transmitted to the acoustic nerve. The signal goes up the acoustic nerve to the brain, where it is perceived as sound.