5 ms·

> families spend money (a lot of it - upwards $50,000 per ear iirc), only to be told later that they have to go through it all again You make it sound like th

> families spend money (a lot of it - upwards $50,000 per ear iirc), only to be told later that they have to go through it all again You make it sound like the surgery is the expensive bit, but as you pointed out, the implant is very basic electronics. The medical procedure is certainly expensive, but the processors are the truly expensive physical product.

m00x 3y ago
Do you have a link to a processor with the price? It doesn't sound that complicated to make tbh. It might just all be FDA approvals.
Izmaki 3y ago
The surgery is the expensive bit. It's a 10-to-1* kind of expense compared to the hearing device you attach to the head. * Rough guess based on the price of regular, high-end "in-the-ear-canal" hearing aids.
- firstlink 3y ago
  > Rough guess based on the price of regular, high-end "in-the-ear-canal" hearing aids. This guess completely missed the point. Cochlear implants are not audio amplifiers like hearing aids are. They must convert sound into electrical impulses which are sent more or less directly at the user's sense organ, via a relatively dumb implant. Now, on the one hand you could say, "yeah well that's just a Fourier transform" but that would also miss the point. A cochlear implant only creates impulses at a limited discrete set of points, and the way those points map to frequencies is not going to obey a nice consistent function. This means the processor must be programmable to adjust the mapping of desired frequency (which may not be the input frequency) to electrodes, which already puts us into needing a rather fancier microprocessor than a hearing aid needs. Moreover, the limited set of frequencies causes a massive loss of signal-to-noise ratio. The processor has to compensate for this intelligently filtering the sound to make the result useful. For example, it may need to detect and filter background noise. It is not really even attempting to replicate natural hearing because that's impossible; it may be more helpful to think of it hijacking the user's aural sense to do something almost totally different with it, but staying just close enough to natural hearing that the brain has a fighting chance of making sense of the inputs.
  - Izmaki 3y ago
    I'm aware it's a different product and that the price is not the same, as was stated. An example of a price was given elsewhere of roughly NZD $8000, which isn't too far off the price of a pair of high-end in ear hearing aids.
whetu 3y ago
NZD50k per side including sound processors. NZD86k-ish if done bilaterally at the same time. Sound processors are around NZD7-8k a pop and have an expected replacement cycle of 5-7 years.

m00x 3y ago

Do you have a link to a processor with the price? It doesn't sound that complicated to make tbh. It might just all be FDA approvals.

Izmaki 3y ago

The surgery is the expensive bit. It's a 10-to-1* kind of expense compared to the hearing device you attach to the head. * Rough guess based on the price of regular, high-end "in-the-ear-canal" hearing aids.

firstlink 3y ago
> Rough guess based on the price of regular, high-end "in-the-ear-canal" hearing aids. This guess completely missed the point. Cochlear implants are not audio amplifiers like hearing aids are. They must convert sound into electrical impulses which are sent more or less directly at the user's sense organ, via a relatively dumb implant. Now, on the one hand you could say, "yeah well that's just a Fourier transform" but that would also miss the point. A cochlear implant only creates impulses at a limited discrete set of points, and the way those points map to frequencies is not going to obey a nice consistent function. This means the processor must be programmable to adjust the mapping of desired frequency (which may not be the input frequency) to electrodes, which already puts us into needing a rather fancier microprocessor than a hearing aid needs. Moreover, the limited set of frequencies causes a massive loss of signal-to-noise ratio. The processor has to compensate for this intelligently filtering the sound to make the result useful. For example, it may need to detect and filter background noise. It is not really even attempting to replicate natural hearing because that's impossible; it may be more helpful to think of it hijacking the user's aural sense to do something almost totally different with it, but staying just close enough to natural hearing that the brain has a fighting chance of making sense of the inputs.
- Izmaki 3y ago
  I'm aware it's a different product and that the price is not the same, as was stated. An example of a price was given elsewhere of roughly NZD $8000, which isn't too far off the price of a pair of high-end in ear hearing aids.

whetu 3y ago

NZD50k per side including sound processors. NZD86k-ish if done bilaterally at the same time. Sound processors are around NZD7-8k a pop and have an expected replacement cycle of 5-7 years.