'Hi-fi ear' new quest for Melbourne bionic ear team
December 17, 2008 - 2:23PM
Thirty years after pioneering the world's first multi-channel bionic ear, Professor Graeme Clark will lead the quest for a new 'hi-fi' ear at Melbourne's La Trobe University.
Professor Clark today unveiled an early prototype of the next generation of electrode fibres to stimulate hearing, saying it was "time to scale the next mountain".
The announcement comes on the 30th anniversary of a world-first in cochlear implant technology - the moment of conclusive proof, defying all scientific prediction, that a deaf person could be helped to understand speech.
The multi-channel cochlear implant was the first device to reliably give speech understanding to severely and profoundly deaf people, and spoken language to children born deaf.
The Graeme Clark Hearing and Neuroscience Unit in La Trobe University's School of Psychological Science will bring together specialists in hearing, speech and language to develop the next step in cochlear technology.
Professor Clark will return to his first love - auditory neurophysiology - as a distinguished professor at the university.
The development of the high-fidelity ear would progress in stages, but Professor Clark said he expected the first results in five years.
"I should think that - if we have the funding, of course - we should see a progression in hi-fi ears over the next five years or so," he said.
"I would hope that ... we will see the children and adults getting better quality sounds and music and better hearing of noise."
The bionic ear is one of the great success stories of Australian research enterprise and bio-medical engineering.
Over the past 20 years, more than 120,000 cochlear implants have been performed in 100 countries, some 70 per cent with the Australian-made Cochlear bionic ear.
Professor Clark said the Australians behind the original cochlear implant had achieved what most scientists around the world said was impossible.
"I operated on August 1, 1978. I took a huge risk. My colleagues said that I might kill my patient putting the most complicated package of electronics into a person," he said.
"It would have been to all no avail if we hadn't found, some two or three months later, how to code the speech signals into meaningful speech understanding.
"I got the glimmer of hope just before Christmas. It was very exciting for me. It was so exciting that I went into the next-door laboratory and burst into tears of joy.
"It was clear then that more work would be done but we had broken the barrier."
La Trobe's advanced hearing and auditory neuroscience laboratory will investigate how the brain responds to sound and how to reproduce this process using bionic devices.
The facility will also examine how deafness and sensory deficits affect brain development, especially for language.
Professor Clark said work had reached a "very good'' plateau over the past nine years but researchers were still only "about 40 per cent the way there''.
"You might say in cricketing terms, we've got first innings points but we want an outright win," he said.
"Ideally, I would like to see a cochlear implant completely embedded with no outside speech processing so that you really wouldn't know someone had anything other than normal ... hearing," he said.
"That's still a way off but we're getting there.
"We're doing our very best and this is what I think this centre is going to do: keep Australia to the fore."
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