Cochlear implants in children: safety as well as speech and language

Abstract

The development of cochlear implants for children at the University of Melbourne and the Bionic Ear Institute, has consisted of a routine of biological and engineering safety followed by evaluation of speech processing strategies on adults before they are undertaken on children. The initial safety studies were to ensure that insertion was atraumatic, the electrical stimulus parameters did not lead to loss of ganglion cells and that the electrode could be inserted without the risk of middle ear infection leading to meningitis. The initial second formant extraction scheme was shown to produce significant open-set speech understanding in adults and was approved by the US Food and Drug Administr..