This time of year I spend most of my day in the orchard either selling peaches or mowing or cleaning up or whatever else is necessary.
One of the opportunities that provides me is the ability to hear the birds. I had no idea, before the implant, how many birds there are on the property. It is a real pleasure being able to hear all the birds again.
One of the other noticeable differences with the implant is that I can again hear “engine noises”. In my youth I spent some time as an apprentice motor mechanic and became accustomed to listening to the sound an engine, and more broadly a vehicle, makes. This becomes a significant part of knowing when an engine or vehicle is having some kind of problem that needs to be investigated.
For me now, that is mostly related to listening to the tractor while spraying. I am, of course, wearing ear plugs and sometimes ear muffs on top of the ear plugs. While they are very effective at reducing decibel levels, I still have a much improved impression of how the tractor is performing than I did before.
Clarity with the implant continues to improve, albeit more slowly than at first. There are moments when I am astounded by how much I understood, particularly when I am not wearing my hearing aid and / or the person is not even even facing me.
This past week I have turned the sensitivity down to the absolute minimum and left the volume in the centre of the available range. I am going to try that for a week to see where it leads. Then I’ll adjust the sensitivity up a little at a time and see where it suits me best. I am sure that different ambient noise levels are going to change results but I can’t drag the controller / charger around to make temporary adjustments based on the environment.
I suspect Envoy already has a cell phone app, and if they don’t they should, but are keeping it in house until the clinical trial is complete so that the results across patients are measured against the same data / environments as much as possible. Adding a cell phone app and a person’s ability to modify their listening “on the fly” would make assessment that much more difficult and the goal here is to get through FDA approval.
More to come…of course 🙂
2 thoughts on “Envoy Acclaim® Cochlear Implant Update”
Would you say voices sound mostly normal now or still Donald Duck-ish?
No, voices don’t sound mostly normal, they sound mostly duckish, just more comprehensible. The more I understand the technology, the less I believe it will ever sound “normal”.
The ear with it’s thousands of scilia picks up a huge range of frequencies (harmonics) in addition to the primary frequency and the implant doesn’t have a hope of doing that. Once you add location and distance and reverberation etc. the implant is great, but limited.