Little Girl Gets New Ear And Cochlear Implant

Parallel to the developments in California, in the 1970s there were two other groups working on the development of the cochlear implant in Vienna, Austria and Melbourne, Australia. On December 16, 1977 professor Kurt Burian implanted a multichannel cochlear implant. The device was developed by the scientists Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair, who founded MED-EL, producer of hearing implants, in 1989.
In December 1984, the Australian cochlear implant was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration to be implanted in adults in the United States. In 1990 the FDA lowered the approved age for implantation to two years, then 18 months in 1998, and finally 12 months in 2002, although off-label use has occurred in babies as young as 6 months in the United States and 4 months internationally.
Throughout the 1990s, the large external components which had been worn strapped to the body grew smaller and smaller thanks to developments in miniature electronics. By 2006, most school-age children and adults used a small behind-the-ear (BTE) speech processor about the size of a power hearing aid. Younger children have small ears and might mishandle behind-the-ear speech processors, therefore, they often wear the sound processor on their hip in a pack or small harness or wear the BTEs pinned to their collar, barrette or elsewhere.
On October 5, 2005, the first of three recipients was implanted with Cochlear's TIKI device, a totally implantable cochlear implant, in Melbourne, Australia. This was part of a research project conducted by Cochlear Ltd. and the University of Melbourne Department of Otolaryngology under the umbrella of CRC HEAR to be the first cochlear implant system capable of functioning for sustained periods with no external components. The system is capable of providing hearing via the TIKI device in stand-alone mode (invisible hearing) or via an external sound processor. Although these recipients continue to use their devices successfully today, it will be many years before a commercial product becomes available.