Cochlear Implants

Graeme Clark

The cochlear implant is a device that bypasses a nonfunctional inner ear and stimulates the auditory nerve directly with patterns of electrical currents derived from incoming sounds. The culmination of investigations in many disciplines, it is the first major advance in helping profoundly deaf children communicate since the Sign Language for the Deaf was developed at the Institution des Jeunes Sourds in Paris some 200 years ago. Written by the "father" of the multi-electrode implant, this comprehensive text and reference gives an account of the fundamental principles underlying cochlear implants and their clinical application. It thus discusses research in all relevant disciplines, including: - Surgical anatomy, concentrating on essentials relevant to engineering - Pathology, focusing on the inner ear's response to the implant and to electrical stimulation - Biophysics and electrochemistry, addressing the interface between electrode and tissue - Neurobiology, with particular emphasis on the issue of safety - Physiology, summarizing current theories of frequency and amplitude coding - Psychophysics, focusing on pitch and loudness perception - Speech science, including phonetics, perception, and language - Electronic principles of signal processing needed for speech perception - Clinical factors of importance to the engineering - Surgical procedures to help scientists and engineers understand the realities for implant development - Communication skills achieved for different speech processing strategies.