Cochlear implants have had great success in restoring hearing to deaf patients, but the surgery is invasive, expensive and not everyone is a suitable candidate.
Now a team from Colorado State University are working on a device which will allow deaf people to ‘hear’ simply by touching their tongue against a small Bluetooth-enabled device.
“It’s much simpler than undergoing surgery and we think it will be a lot less expensive than cochlear implants,” said John Williams, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“What we are trying to do is another form of sensory substitution.
“Cochlear implants are very effective and have transformed many lives, but not everyone is a candidate. We think our device will be just as effective but will work for many more people and cost less.”
Williams has spent much of his career developing electric propulsion systems for spacecraft, and therefore was exposed to lots of powerful vacuum devices used to simulate conditions outside our atmosphere, which eventually caused him to develop tinnitus.
It was while reading up on cochlear implants that he decided to create a new, less invasive version of his own.
Cochlear implants take sound from outside the body, convert it into an electrical signal and transmit it directly to the auditory nerve. The new mouthpiece system works in a similar way, taking audio from an earpiece microphone and sending it to the mouthpiece via Bluetooth, but then transmitting the signal instead to the many sensitive nerves found in the tongue.
Dr Williams and graduate student JJ Moritz have spent a year testing prototypes and have now filed a provisional patent and launched a start-up company to bring it to market.
It will require practice for the user to interpret the signals sent to the tongue as sound, but Leslie Stone-Roy, assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, believes it can be done with a couple of month’s practice.
“We have a remarkable amount of plasticity in our brain even as adults,” she said. “We now know that is able to make changes and adapt to changes in incoming information, especially stimuli that are of importance to the individual.”
The current prototype is a large device, but researchers believe that it will eventually be built into a tiny unit which can be worn invisibly in the mouth.