Yesterday, February 11 2026, I went for my first post-turn on reprogramming and checkup with how things are going.
I will likely expand this a little later but I want to get my initial reaction down while the memory is till fresh.
I can’t say enough about how friendly, and professional at the same time, everyone is. From Dr Sammy, Dr. Kara of MUSC and Ben from Envoy Medical. Even the intern who is just finishing her post-graduate, everyone is friendly, courteous and helpful.
We had a few technical problems with the device and getting it connected to the laptops for re-calibration and re-programming. That probably took the greatest amount of time after the in-booth tests. I’ll explain some of my results a bit later.
I reported what I found with the battery charger device and apparently they have had other people saying that if the coils move off the implanted battery and they battery charger sends the 3 alerts and switches off, it will not switch on again unless you first plug the implant charger into the wall to be charged.
The other issue I had, and apparently this is fairly common in this initial device, is that the cable coming out of the implant charger and programmer “frays”. It looks more like a split to me, nevertheless, Ben from Envoy replaced the whole device. It had been working just fine but I guess better to be safe than sorry.
More to come…sorry about the brevity but I have a really busy day pruning and otherwise farming…
Later…
So we initially got the Acclaim connected to the laptop and recalibrated it using tones and me saying when it was loud enough. We tried to get each frequency range at the same volume but that just was not possible in the higher frequencies. By higher I mean in the 3K – 8K range. Above 4k my hearing was very spotty.
Once calibrated, we set the volume as loud as was comfortable and then programmed 4 profiles with 1 and 2 being softer than the “comfortably loud” setting, 3 at that level and profile 4 a little louder. Then it was off to the booth for various tests, similar to regular hearing tests.
In summary, we determined that I have no natural hearing remaining in my right ear and that my word comprehension, without context was about 20%. That’s essentially where it was before the implant.
We also looked at the graph of my left and right hearing and my left hearing was as before, -100db, but my right ear hearing was lifted to only about -40db, which is a vast improvement.
The frequency range is limited to about 150hz to about 3k, from what I could tell.
My next appointment is in April when we will do a little more tweaking. In the meantime I intend to work hard at speech recognition and retraining my brain.
As I have said before, I am very happy with the present level of improvement. However, if I did not have my left ear at least functioning at the level it is, having a conversation would be very difficult with just my implant.