Review of Current Status of Cochlear Prostheses

This paper reviews the present status of cochlear prostheses which operate by direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Over 200 cochlear prostheses have now been implanted. Recent results indicate that surprisingly good speech discrimination results are possible in favorable cases with single channel systems. Full speech comprehension, however, probably requires more complete spectral information input than is achievable with single channel systems, and studies with multichannel systems are being vigorously pursued at several laboratories. It appears that the electrode and electronics hardware problems are nearing solution, but that successful strategies for using multielectrode arrays for the effective injection of speech information are still lacking. Much of the effort in multichannel cochlear prostheses now centers on the speech analysis and stimulation paradigm problem.