Developing a high-performance patient-to-image registration system for robotic cochlear implant surgery: Through the human-robot interaction-focused design method leading to a multi-modal, multi-feedback admittance control, touch-based pair-point bone-anchored fiducial registration and its performance measured in accuracy, workload, usability and trust

This thesis presents the research to design a successful high-accuracy, sub-millimetric registration method for an autonomous robot equipped to drill bone for cochlear implant (CI) surgery. Its performance, and thus success, is measured in accuracy, workload, usability and trust. While state-of-the-art (STOTA) research lacks the inclusion of...

Development and Evaluation of a New CI Pitch Perception Test - the Glide Tone Test

Current speech-encoding strategies in cochlear implants (CI’s) do not provide their users with sufficient spectral resolution for complex listening tasks and pitch perception. This paper presents a new test that has been developed to assess pitch perception: the glide tone test (GTT). A total of 25 normal hearing (NH) participants were tested to...

Advances in cochlear implants

Cochlear implants restore hearing to many people around the world. These devices are hand-made and have limitations in terms of sound quality. The maximum number of electrodes at present is 22 and this means that the sound spectrum is divided into 22 blocks. Furthermore, the breadth of the implant limits penetration and thus lower frequencies...

Towards All-Polymeric Cochlear Implant Micro-Electrode Arrays

Cochlear implants (CIs) are the most effective solution to treat severe-to-profound hearing loss. These medical devices mimic and replace the function of the damaged structures of the cochlea. To this date, more than 700,000 individuals worldwide have benefited from CIs. However, state-of-the-art CIs do not provide a natural and high-quality...

Towards All-Polymeric Cochlear Implant Micro-Electrode Arrays

This paper shows that PEDOT:PSS is an excellent material for all-polymeric cochlear implant micro-electrode arrays. Initial experiments have shown a high conductivity of 230 S/cm for PEDOT:PSS samples, which dramatically decreased to 0.48 S/cm after 3 hours of UV treatment. Electrical characterisation of PEDOT:PSS electrodes reveals that its...

Monitoring Electrode Array Tip Fold-over In Cochlear Implantation

In cochlear implantation surgery, the appropriate placement of the electrode array into the cochlea is vital. Suboptimal placement of the electrode array may lead to reduced hearing performance and speech recognition after the surgery. Currently, there are methods to confirm the electrode position post-operatively (e.g. through a CT scan), but...

Assessing the Effects of Deafness on Cortical Activity Peaks in the Developing Human Auditory System Measured by an EEG Neuroimaging Method

Bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) can restore hearing in deaf children, by electrically stimulating the auditory pathways. The effects of long-term deafness have been extensively studied and it is well known that deafness leads to cross-modal reorganization of the brain. However, the short term effects of CI use on the developing auditory...

Analog Integrated Circuit and System Design for a Compact, Low-Power Cochlear Implant

Cochlear Implants (CIs) are prosthetic devices that restore hearing in profoundly deaf patients by bypassing the damaged parts of the inner ear and directly stimulating the remaining auditory nerve fibers in the cochlea with electrical pulses. This thesis describs the electronic circuit design of various modules for application in CIs in order...

Characterization of metals for Cochlear Implants

The need for Cochlear Implants (CI's) with improved functionality and quality requires new techniques to be used to manufacture the electrode array. Titanium nitride (TiN) is one of the contenders for use as metal in the future CI's, but its characteristics need to be verified, measured and tested. A metal should comply to certain requirements...

Design and fabrication of stiff silicon probes: A step towards sophisticated cochlear implant electrodes

Cochlear implants work on the principle of direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. It has advantages to replace their traditional wired electrodes by a high-density thin-film multielectrode stimulation array which is relatively small in dimensions, stable, resistant to electrolysis, and offers batch fabrication capabilities with...

A front-end for sensing the stimulation and response of auditory nerve cells

At the moment, about 30 million people worldwide are suffering from hearing loss. Most people are helped with a simple hearing aid that just amplifies sounds coming to the ear. However, if the hearing loss is too severe, these aids will not help. More than 100.000 people worldwide need a more complex device in order to let them hear again. A...