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1 in 1000 children is born deaf. Depending on the type of hearing loss, cochlear implants can help deaf babies acquire speech almost as well as normally hearing babies.
Not too long ago, when a person was deaf they had to rely on sign language to communicate. Thanks to small implantable devices, known as cochlear implants, this has changed over the course of the past decades. About 1 in a 1000 children are born deaf, and 4 in 1000 adults in the US are profoundly deaf. To date, about 150,000 of these people have been implanted. For most of them, these neural prostheses are a lifeline that restores basic auditory function. Cochlear implants are perhaps the most successful neural prosthesis to date.
Cochlear implants work on a technical principle whose basic origins date back to the late 18th century, to Wolfgang von Kempelen. In 1769, von Kempelen, ingeniously invented the world's first speaking machine that synthesized speech with a two part system - a circuit consisting of an acoustic source and a bank of acoustic filters. His work has inspired a long line of research and was further developed by famous engineers, such as Sir Charles Wheatstone, Alexander Graham Bell and Homer Dudley. Read the rest of this entry »