The first fully implanted cochlear implant reaches patients (spectrum.ieee.org)

Wow, I only knew of the Decibel Tx (now Regeneron) work on this. I'm excited for this because my wife and I carry mutations in GJB2 that we did pre-implantation genetic screening to avoid in our daughter. At the time, the only one that was in trials was the OTOF-fixing one, but that is non-degenerative unlike the GJB2 stuff.

A quick LLM search reveals that there's quite a few of these trying to fix this. A summary after some accompanied google.

* Skylark - https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/first-patient-skyla...

* Sensorion - https://www.sensorion.com/en/fiches-produits/gjb2-gt-2/

* Eli Lilly bought one - https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

And an unfortunate update is that Regeneron (which acquired Decibel Therapeutics and all their gene-therapy lines regarding hearing loss) has mostly put their efforts behind the working OTOF one. Ah well, hope the others succeed. While I do have one precious daughter from the embryo selection process, we don't have that many embryos to work with.

If anyone else affected is interested, the notes I took and wrote while we were doing our embryo-selection process are here: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF

The technology is amazing, for sure. But the success of the current CI tech is also a testament to how fantastically adaptable the human brain is.

A normal cochlea has 15-20.000 tonotopically mapped hair cells that turn mechanical movement into electric signals which the brain then turn into meaningful sound. The fact that the brain can also make sense of the electrical signals coming out of just twelve to sixteen little electrical contacts placed along a silicon noodle that gets shoved into the cochlea, and turn this crude signal into into speech and music, is nothing short of mind blowing!

Yet another Aussie invention too i believe :-)

I can definitely believe it. According to every audiologist I’ve been to, my hearing is normal for my age, though on the lower end of the expected range for some frequencies.

However if I’m in a noisy restaurant it always seems like everyone else at the table can hold the conversation just fine but I can’t hear a damn thing they’re saying. It’s very isolating. I can’t understand how they do it.

My father uses hearing aids but even with them I can see him sort of just receding from a conversation sometimes.

It’s pretty terrible. I started losing my hearing in my mid 30s. Best guess is genetics. My loss right now in my early 50s would be termed moderate, not quite severe but it continues to get worse.

Hearing aids have come a long way but all of the ones I’ve used still basically suck when it comes to understanding speech. Part of it, I think, is that my loss isn’t bad enough that fully closed ear pieces are recommended and as such background noise is still free to obfuscate conversation.

It basically makes conversation in anything but a quiet room extremely difficult. My brain works overtime trying to fit possible words to what I hear. Sometimes I fail with pretty humiliating results.

It doesn’t take much before you just stop trying to talk with people. Especially with the younger crowd because they tend to speak the quietest. It varies by individual, but at least older people who’ve had some loss themselves will speak louder to compensate.

The worst is restaurants. Usually I can guess what’s being said by the server, but not always. Accents increase difficulty.

I used to be pretty out going, joked a lot with people. Now I avoid most conversations when I can.

> This seems like it would not afford him the luxury of that.

An "off" switch seems like a really stupid thing to forget to include, doesn't it?

Even if we ignore our intuition and consider only what's in TFA, there's this testimony near the end of the article (emphasis added):

> This was echoed by Diana Grosser, a volunteer who received a TICI Unico in 2024 as part of the clinical trial. “The most meaningful change is freedom,” she said. “I can sometimes forget that I’m deaf, live more freely with my children, swim or ride my motorcycle without worrying about my processor pressing, slipping, or getting lost. I can even choose to hear at night, which gives me additional safety.”

You can turn it off.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it seems to be MRI conditional without too much drama. One of the requirements is that it’s turned off, which the user does from their controller.

Edit: getting specific details on its MRI safety is the same as it is for all medical companies. Set language and region (this somehow affect MRI safety?) and then hunt for implant. But not all implants are listed in all regions. Because ‘medical professionals’ want to hunt shitty websites and trawl model numbers.

Just list the documents ordered by implant type, then name. Please.

I don't blame your father-in-law: We live in an increasingly loud world, where people casually make sounds above the threshold of pain. I just started carrying earplugs in my pocket for this reason.

More recently: I've been in movie theaters where the dialog is played over the threshold of pain, and on a cruise where the microphone for a drawing clinic was set over the threshold of pain.

I have a IV port implant. The needles to use with it are licensed and very tightly controlled. It's not a prosthetic, but it is a part of my body I can't actually use without a company's permission.

Like the bionic eye. We have a famous early-adopter in the country where I life. Sadly, she learnt quickly that going for this sort of tech was a bad idea, because the company producing/maintaining the thing went out of bussiness by now. Imagine the feeling. You have experimental tech inside your body, and nobody is able to maintain it these days.

Yeah, this desperately needs regulation. Any medical device that gets implanted in a patient's body requires the full designs to be part of the public record. Might fix all those unsecured wireless connections they love to leave in as well...

Not quite; they estimate that the battery will hold at least 24 hours of charge after 15 years. Charging it back up takes one hour, and in the context of cochlear implants these are very good numbers. I think most people would be okay with a (let's say) 20-year reimplant cadence given the benefits of this technology - but this obviously depends on which country you happen to live in. I'm lucky enough to live in a place where cochlear implants (and the surgery) is free to whoever needs it.

  The first implanted cardiac pacemaker used nickel-cadmium rechargeable battery, later on zinc-mercury battery was developed and used which lasted for over 2 years. Lithium iodine battery invented and used by Wilson Greatbatch and his team in 1972 made the real impact to implantable cardiac pacemakers. This battery lasts for about 10 years and even today is the power source for many manufacturers of cardiac pacemakers.

> They think the lithium ion battery inside will need to be replaced in 15 years.

Pacemaker batteries have a 10 year replacement cycle and are lithium based, but don't get recharged (Just replaced). The concept of having to do this on a schedule is not that far fetched.

This is slightly conspiratorial but I suspect that hearing aid vendors lock-in people the same way through neural adaption.

If someone has profound high frequency deafness, no amount of amplification will help. High frequencies carry a lot of the information about consonants and are how we distinguish "t" from "s" etc.

So modern hearing aids do frequency remapping. A low frequency signal is produced within the range of hearing when those high frequency inputs are detected. The sharp 2500 and 6000 Hz peaks of an aspirated "t" become a sort of raspy tone at 1500 Hz, for example.

This is why they say you need to wear your hearing aids for at least some weeks before you notice a benefit. You're relearning language with the extra DSP sounds added. If you grow up with and wear hearing aids most of the time, your brain will be fully adapted to the DSP-speech.

Which is proprietary to the manufacturer. Every manufacturer uses a different algorithm. There's several ways to remap - the classic time vs. frequency multiplexing question. This (along with different noise reduction algorithms) explains why hearing aids from two different manufacturers can sound so very different.

I am being quasi-conspiratorial about it being an intentional lock-in. But one does wonder. In practice the method used by the hearing aids you grew up with is probably the only method you can make full use of.

Not to knock the technology. It's quasi-miraculous for some types of partial deafness. With plain amplification even at 95 dB my WRS is like 60%, while with hearing aids set at much lower 80 dB output average I get 100%.

Lots of information (albeit from the audiologist's perspective) about frequency lowering here: https://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/fitting-guide-frequ...

It's like in Ghost in the Shell where your augmenting cybernetic parts needs to be returned after service periods ends

Given that MED-EL, the company mentioned in the article, has been around since 1990 and is constantly expanding, I would assume that this is indeed viable.

I live in Innsbruck, Austria, where MED-EL is headquartered. Like most people I know, I too have briefly worked there in 2008. I currently live 5 minutes on foot from where the entrance used to be back then, before it was walled off, they massively expanded the building and added another building behind it, where in 2008 a bunch of office containers with clean rooms used to be. There is now a raised walk way to the other side where they used to rent just a few units back then and now co-opted the building, plus a patch work of smaller rental spaces all around.

The implants themselves are not cheap and (at least at the time?) eventually needed to replaced. From what I recall, some of the technology involved was also licensed out or sold for other applications. Ultimately, I would also guess that all the licensing, approval and red-tape involved in actually making implants for humans also kind of limits competition quite a bit.

> what's stopping the company from playing some ads for users tiers platinum and lower?

Any sane government

Amazing: the tech industry is so morally bankrupt that it manages to make healthcare look altruistic!

You could share the same concern about any cochlear implant, I suppose. There are three (Med-El, Advanced Bionics, and Cochlear) and all are quite stable and provide great support.

We are routinely implanting pacemakers in people's bodies. I don't think this is fundamentally different.

Battery tech used in these devices is most likely very different from consumer electronics and I assume they can't just catch fire inside your body.