However, some individuals will experience dizziness, and on rare occasions, tinnitus or facial nerve bruising.įrom the early days of implants in the 1970s and the 1980s, speech perception via an implant has steadily increased. Surgical risks are minimal and most individuals will undergo outpatient surgery and go home the same day.

The surgical procedure is performed under general anesthesia. The inside component, the actual implant, has a coil to receive signals, electronics, and an array of electrodes which is placed into the cochlea, which stimulate the cochlear nerve. This component, the sound processor, contains microphones, electronics that include digital signal processor (DSP) chips, battery, and a coil that transmits a signal to the implant across the skin. The outside component is generally worn behind the ear, but could also be attached to clothing, for example, in young children.

Through everyday listening and auditory training, cochlear implants allow both children and adults to learn to interpret those signals as speech and sound. A CI bypasses acoustic hearing by direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. With the help of therapy, cochlear implants may allow for improved speech understanding in both quiet and noisy environments. A cochlear implant ( CI) is a surgically implanted neuroprosthesis that provides a person who has moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss with sound perception.

Aural training cochlear implant