Is a cochlear implant for you?
A cochlear implant is a device which provides useful hearing sensations and improved communication ability for adults and children who have a severe, profound or total hearing loss in both ears.
Cochlear implants provide an important option for individuals who receive little or no benefit from a hearing aid.
What are the possible benefits for adults?
A cochlear implant will not return a person's hearing to normal, however, it can provide very useful auditory cues. While the benefits from an implant will not be the same for everyone, from experience we can expect:
Restored detection of everyday sounds in the environment
Being able to hear a greater range of sounds at generally softer levels means people are more aware of sounds in their environment. With experience, they can soon learn to identify which sounds are which.
Improved face-to-face communication.
Combining the auditory information available through an implant with visual cues from lip-reading can greatly enhance the hearing-impaired person's understanding and fluency in a conversation.
The ability to understand speech through hearing alone.
Advances in speech processing technology have led to most adults (with an acquired hearing loss) nowadays being able to very quickly recognize about 80% of a spoken message without the aid of lip-reading. This means that most people can once again make use of the telephone.
Greater confidence to interact and socialize.
Once people feel they can understand others more easily, they begin to feel more confident contributing to conversations at home and work. They feel like participating again, in what used to be potentially embarrassing or stressful interactions.
It should be noted that clinical data indicates that the longer a person has been profoundly deaf, the more difficult it is for them to gain meaningful information from a cochlear implant. Generally speaking, if people have not developed listening skills that assist their communication, by the time they are a teenager, they are unlikely to do so by receiving a cochlear implant.
What are the possible benefits for children?
Our experience shows that many children can achieve the same benefits as adults, although progress may be a lot slower. Most children who receive cochlear implants lose their hearing before they have developed speech, language or even listening skills. This means that they probably won't have a memory of speech and language to relate to the sound from their cochlear implant. Learning to listen and speak then, without the knowledge of speech and language normally obtained at an early age, requires extra effort and can be a long process. Clinical data does show, however, that over 80% of children learn to recognize speech and develop functional speech and language skills.
