The South Africa bionic ear-description and preliminary results

Bionic ear is the popular name given to the cochlear implant, a system for the functional electrical stimulation of the cochlea of a profoundly deaf person. The object of this electrical stimulation is to imitate the function of a normally functioning cochlea so that the neural code conducted to the brain is as close as possible to the neural code generated by the cochlea of a hearing person. A bionic ear currently being developed at the University of Pretoria is described. It consists of eight implanted electrodes and a speech processor which is worn externally. A suitable speech processing algorithm was implemented on the TMS 320-10 DSP (digital signal processing). For the evaluation of patient performance, the MAC (minimal auditory capabilities) battery is used. Results at this stage are encouraging, indicating that it is at least possible to aid the patient in lip reading and to put him or her into contact with the rich variety of environmental sounds. It was found that it is possible to produce a cost-effective bionic ear which is as good as or better than imported systems