ABSTRACT
The improvement in speech reception (Osberger et al., 2000; Anderson et al., 2002; Parkinson et al., 2002) enjoyed by the profoundly hearing-impaired using today’s cochlear implant systems easily places them second to cardiac pacemakers as the most successful neural prostheses in use today. While this success is built upon a framework of modern advances in fields such as medicine, auditory physiology and psychophysics, materials science, electrical engineering, and electronic technology, the idea of using electricity to elicit sensations of hearing, dates to the 18th century (for reviews oriented around hearing, see Simmons, 1966; Niparko and Wilson, 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the rationale for cochlear implantation, discuss the benefits associated with current devices, and provide an example of how researchers approach the task of improving these devices
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