New Implant Opens World of Sound for Deaf People
After struggling with body language, lip reading and sign language, Emily Trottier finally can tell her deaf husband what’s on her mind. And for the first time in 15 years, he can hear her.
Earl Trottier, a 67-year-old retired auto mechanic who became completely deaf in 1969, can hear his wife’s voice because of a cochlear implant, a four-channel electronic device that can give the deaf another chance to understand speech.
“It’s like a miracle to be able to really talk to him again,” Emily Trottier told a recent news conference at the University of California, San Francisco, where the device was developed and implanted in Trottier last August.
Daily Problems of Deafness
“It’s very difficult living with a deaf person,” she said. “It’s not the big things as much as it is the little, everyday things, the little conversations back and forth that really make up a big part of your life. When those are canceled out, things are pretty difficult.”
About 250 of the estimated 100,000 adult Americans who share Trottier’s deafness are being selected for clinical tests at a dozen university medical schools, private clinics and hospitals across the nation, said Dr. Robert Schindler, clinical director of the UC San Francisco Cochlear Implant Project.
“We are taking people who are totally, absolutely, irrevocably deaf, who hear nothing with a hearing aid, and we are converting them into people that have hearing with an artificial device,” he said.
At first, researchers plan to use the device only in people who became deaf as adults, he said.
Easier to Communicate
“The reason we chose these patients is that these people can tell us what we need to know--when the device is working well, does it sound like speech, does it sound like noise?” Schindler said. “As we gain more experience with people who have normal speech and language, there is no question that this device will have enormous impact on deaf children.”
Symbion, a Salt Lake City-based company, also is testing a multichannel hearing device, and the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a single-channel device produced by 3M Co. However, those devices are unable to separate and clarify sounds as effectively as the UC San Francisco device, Schindler said.
The single-channel device is like banging several piano keys with one hand, and other multichannel devices are akin to banging all the keys at once, he said.
“In this case, we are beginning to play the piano with our hands, our fingers. We can deliver different information to each of the four channels we are activating,” he said. “It is this reason . . . that allows for the possibility of speech discrimination.”
The actual implant takes six hours and costs about $20,000, including hospitalization, Schindler said. Insurance companies seem willing to pay for new procedure, he said, adding that he expects FDA approval within a year.
Under the Skin
The device, manufactured by Storz Instrument Co. of St. Louis., consists of an intracochlear electrode for the inner ear, a connector, a four-channel receiver and four small antenna coils, all of which are surgically implanted under the skin.
In addition, patients wear an external device similar to a hearing aid that is attached by thin cables to a compact speech processor, worn at the waist or shoulder. It changes speech and other sounds into signals that can be picked up by the implanted receiver.
With the new device, developed in the last 14 years by Schindler, otolaryngology professors Michael Merzenich and Robin Michelson and a team of engineers, Trottier can understand 30% to 40% of speech without any lip-reading cues. When combined with his lip reading skills, Trottier understands about 80%.
It has made life happier and more bearable for the Trottiers, who spent much of the last 15 years trying to figure out how to communicate.
“We tried sign language, and that didn’t seem to work, and a little lip reading, and that didn’t seem to work. And body English was our best means of communication,” Emily Trottier said.
