A small electronic device inserted into the ear of deaf whose capability level of hearing is null. It can be placed behind the ear or inside the ear through surgical procedure. It has a microphone, speech processor, transmitter and an electrode array. It is different from hearing aid and cannot restore normal hearing. Scholarly peer review is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal. The work may be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted neuroprosthetic device to provide a person with moderate to profound sensorineural hearing loss a modified sense of sound. CI bypasses the normal acoustic hearing process to replace it with electric signals which directly stimulate the auditory nerve.
From the early days of implants in the 1970s and the 1980s, speech perception via an implant has steadily increased. Many users of modern implants gain reasonable to good hearing and speech perception skills post-implantation, especially when combined with lipreading. However, for pre-lingually deaf children the risk of not acquiring spoken language even with an implant may be as high as 30%. One of the challenges that remain with these implants is that hearing and speech understanding skills after implantation show a wide range of variation across individual implant users. Factors such as duration and cause of hearing loss, how the implant is situated in the cochlea, the overall health of the cochlear nerve, but also individual capabilities of re-learning are considered to contribute to this variation, yet no certain predictive factors are known.
Despite providing the ability for hearing and oral speech communication to children and adults with severe to profound hearing loss, there is also controversy around the devices. Much of the strongest objection to cochlear implants has come from the Deaf community. For some in the Deaf community, cochlear implants are an affront to their culture, which as some view it, is a minority threatened by the hearing majority.NASA engineer Adam Kissiah started working in the mid-1970s on what could become the modern cochlear implant. Kissiah used his knowledge learned while working as an electronics instrumentation engineer at NASA. This work took place over 3 years, when Kissiah would spend his lunch breaks and evenings in Kennedy’s technical library, studying the impact of engineering principles on the inner ear. In 1977, NASA helped Kissiah obtain a patent for the cochlear implant; Kissiah later sold the patent rights