I left this weeks update until the end of the day so that if anything unusual occurred I would not have to make an additional entry.
Progress this past week has been slow. The birds are sounding a little more natural and I seem to be able to hear more of them, although I am not sure that is 100% accurate.
I’ve pretty much got a routine of charging my battery every 3rd evening although yesterday I forgot and found my implant battery at 6% this morning so I charged it this morning which took about three and a half hours. I have noticed, and I do not know why this is the case, that a couple of times now even though the charger is above 70% when I finish charging the implant and it is turned “off” that when I turn it on a day or two later it has been happily discharging itself and, when I turn it on, it has this radical alert that the charger needs charging.
I still have the Donald Duck filter on but I am either learning to understand Donald better or my brain is actually reducing the duck filter. I can’t tell which at this point.
I have been practicing the guitar as I have a gig coming up on Saturday. Sometimes I practice without my hearing aid in the other ear. While I can do that, and I can hear and discern what I am doing, it does not sound great. The sounds from my two ears are merged and, partly because of the way I have the Acclaim set, my implant ear overwhelms my “natural” (left) ear.
The dog bark test is pretty much the same as last week. Sounds more like a duck quack that a dog bark, but it is actually improving.
I think if I had to cope with just the implant, from a communications point of view I could do that, and if I wanted to play the piano or guitar I could manage to do that too, but the music would sound so bad I would not want to play any music.
Despite having the implant cranked up to the max, I don’t find the “ambient” noise level bothers me at all. Especially when I am trying to go to sleep. I have no problem with hissing etc.
The other thing that is astounding is the lack of tinnitus. That alone is worth the wearing of the Acclaim.
All in all, I am still very happy with the implant and would recommend the device to anyone contemplating a CI, although I would probably suggest waiting until the Acclaim receives FDA approval.
This week I will be opening the pool and I am very much looking forward to how that is going to go. It has been a long while since I was able to have a conversation of any kind while swimming.
2 thoughts on “Weekly Envoy Acclaim Update”
I would have to agree with you “The other thing that is astounding is the lack of tinnitus” I wear my AB processor 24/7 for this very reason. I was just thinking today while watering outdoor plants….what would this tech be like if Google or Apple had designed CI’s. I suspect much further along…
Hi John. Glad to hear your AB is helping your tinnitus. I find that interesting because I was told by my audiologists, AB and the team at MUSC that the CI is not likely to help with the tinnitus.
As for Google, Apple or some other tech company, I’m not sure they would have done any better than the companies that have specialized in this area. Their technologies are more general, generally speaking, and not as specialized as developing a CI.
From the research I have done, a lot of the “problems” CI suffer from are due to the limitations, not just the technology, but also our understanding of how hearing and the brain works. There was a lot of debate, for example, until relatively recently about what causes tinnitus.
Then there are physical limitations of replacing hundreds or thousands of scilia with a very finite set of electrodes / probes with no way to know how to place them exactly in the cochlear. Nobody has been able to really monitor what’s going on in the cochlear to translate sound into electrical input to the brain. Then you have to consider that for X number of years, the brain has been training to understand those impulses in one way, then along comes CI and it has to start from scratch, with a far less pliable brain (like mine :)).
I looked at AB while I was living in Valencia but I did not qualify at that time.