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	Cochlear Implants

Before understanding how the cochlear implant or a hearing aid is beneficial to hearing-impaired, we should know the process of hearing. When a sound is produced, it is picked up by the outer ear and sent to the eardrum. The eardrum passes it on to the 3 small bones in the middle ear: the hammer, anvil, and stirrup to magnify the sound. This then goes to the inner ear, containing fluid. The waves penetrate the cochlea that has microscopic, tiny hair cells convert the sound vibration into electrical energy. The cochlea is shaped like a snail. Hair cells are organized along the length of the base (bigger end) of the cochlea to the apex (smaller end). The hair cells at the base are stirred by high frequency sounds and the ones near the apex by low-frequency sounds. Then your brain that obtains the energy, interprets it as a sound.

Prior to deciding if you should use hearing aids or cochlear implants or a hybrid device, your hearing loss should be tested by an otolaryngologist. You will be sent to an audiologist to detect the amount of hearing loss, especially the impaired sound frequencies, the capacity to understand speech and if the hearing loss is sensorineural, conductive, or both. Those suffering from conductive hearing loss can differentiate between words with similar sound; albeit at a higher volume will find hearing aids useful as they magnify the sound. Those with badly damaged inner ear will not benefit from the hearing aid. Hearing aids are only useful if you have a large numbers of working hair cells per frequency being amplified. Those with a hearing loss have comparatively good low-frequency hearing and hardly or no high-frequency hearing. If they wear a hearing aid, it would magnify the lower frequency sounds nicely but won’t do anything for the higher frequencies. So they won’t be able to hear high-frequency sounds, no matter how much they are magnified.

At this point, cochlear implants are useful. They ignore these dead hair cells and transmit the sound signal directly into the auditory nerve, allowing your brain to hear them in spite of the dead hair cells. The cochlear implant has to be implanted in the inner ear through the surgery. But it does not give louder or clearer sound. Rather, the device ignores damaged parts of the auditory system and directly works on the auditory nerve, helping the hearing impaired to hear.

A cochlear implant is a little, complicated electronic device that makes up for damaged or dysfunctional parts of the inner ear. When hearing normally, parts of the inner ear change sound waves in the air into electrical impulses. These impulses are passed on the brain, which is recognized by the person with a good hearing as sound. A cochlear implant operates similarly. Electronically, it detects useful sounds and sends them to the brain. So hearing through an implant may have different sound than normal hearing, but it lets the wearer to communicate properly with language.

The cochlear implant consists of an array of electrodes, inserted into the cochlea of the inner ear, to send sounds to the auditory nerve and then to the brain, by using a signal-processing unit. An implant consists of 4 parts:

An external microphone that captures sound from the environment; An external speech processor that chooses and arranges sounds captured by the microphone; An external transmitter that gets signals from the speech processor and transforms them into electric impulses; Internal electrodes inserted into the cochlea of the inner ear, to transmit the impulses to the brain.

An implant can help those severely hard of hearing a helpful auditory understanding of the environment and allow lip reading ability. It can assist deaf children in acquiring language, particularly phonological development. The implant removes problems with acoustic feedback and ear-mold issues accompanying hearing aids. The drawbacks are: high cost, risks associated with surgery and cochlear implantation is done very close to the facial nerves.

They are particularly right for deafened children and adults who already know spoken word. For them, the stimulus generated by the implant correlates nicely to their knowledge of language and can be a helpful tool. For others, the auditory information provided by the implant may be inadequate and hence the job of learning the spoken language may be tough. Before going in for cochlear transplants, you should remember that in case the implant is rejected by the body or doesn't provide expected result, the cochlea is likely to be damaged and any remaining natural hearing is totally destroyed.

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