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First Implantable Cochlear Implant Launches

18 points rbanffy 3 days ago 11 comments

purplekohav 3 days ago | parent

This could be game-changing technology for people who need it.

blamestross 1 hour ago | parent

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

I feel like implants like this should require an open connectivity standard between the stimulator in the cochlea and the processor.

A friend has a bone anchored hearing aid, with an osteointegrated post. The two different companies that make BAHAs use different posts. Which requires more surgery if they want to change brands. It could trivially be made compatible and swappable instead.

There is no vendor lock-in quite like prosthetic vendor lock-in.

Trusting a company for 15 years to keep making a replacement product seems crazy.

blamestross 1 hour ago | parent

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.

lynx97 1 hour ago | parent

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.

swiftcoder 57 minutes ago | parent

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...

rolfus 55 minutes ago | parent

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.

blamestross 38 minutes ago | parent

I kinda view Lithium batteries as road flares with good PR. So that inside my body next to my brain seems..sketchy.

The other issue is that cutting it out and replacing it is the only option when the battery dies or goes wrong. If the product/company dies in the meantime, you have a bunch of scar tissue and no hearing. Replacing the "normally inside" bits of a cochlear implant is really high risk of not working as intended, so changing brands isn't a small ask. You really get to do this once. So putting the processor inside and tightly integrated with the nerve stimulation seems inadvisable. At least with the processor separated, you have a chance a compatible replacement processor could be made and exchanged without huge risks.

weinzierl 57 minutes ago | parent

When I first heard about Cochlear Implants I thought this is magic. That we can replace a part of the body that does some calculation mechanically with a real time computer simulation of it blew my mind.

Nowadays these implants must be quite common. At least I encounter people wearing ones regularly. If their life can get more convenient with an implantable version this is fantastic news.

rolfus 47 minutes ago | parent

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!

AnaSpelunker 47 minutes ago | parent

Is it viable as anything but subscription service? I mean if you want technical staff with expertise to continue working on it they need to continue getting paid. It's a gamble that your one time payment (however large) will be responsibly managed by the company owners once the flow of new clients dries up. And once you are on the hook what's stopping the company from playing some ads for users tiers platinum and lower?

xeonmc 16 minutes ago | parent

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