30th Birthday of one of the greatest Aussie inventions: The Bionic Ear

3 August 2008

The Cochlear Implant is up there with penicillin, the black box flight recorder and the Hills Hoist as one of Australia’s most well known inventions and this year it will celebrate its 30th Birthday.

The first successful implant was done on August 1st 1978 and the patient was Rod Saunders who had lost his hearing due to a car accident.

Creator of Bionic Ear, Professor Graeme Clark AC said he was told he was mad thinking he could make a deaf person hear again when he first started working on the implant.

"I was determined to make the impossible, possible and I had a lot of pressure riding of the success of the implant. If it didn’t work, I would have been out on the streets."

Since the first bionic ear was implanted at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital 30 years ago, 120,000 people in 80 countries have benefited from the technology and around 70 per cent of operations worldwide use a model based on the original technology incorporating several technology upgrades over the years.

Director of Audiological Services at the Eye and Ear and Head of the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Melbourne Professor Richard Dowell said the dream that deaf children could learn to speak normally is now a reality, but there are still many challenges.

"We need to identify hearing problems early and make sure children and their families receive the right care in the crucial pre-school years. We now know that cochlear implants in both ears provide the best chance for a deaf child to have normal educational opportunities but this brings many technical and funding challenges."

"There remain basic research challenges to improve the hearing obtained via cochlear implants, particularly to provide better musical appreciation and to regenerate and repair lost and damaged hearing nerves. But overall, cochlear implantation has gone far beyond what anyone could have imagined 30 years ago in providing improved communication to thousands of people around the world."

Ari Fisher is one of the thousands of recipients whose life has been turned around because of the cochlear implant.

He said he is a regular school boy in Year 10 doing all the crazy stuff that school kids do – playing footy, listening to music, calling my friends on the phone.

"I am also part of the sound tech crew at school. Imagine a deaf boy monitoring the sound system at school assemblies! But sometimes I lie awake with my implant tucked away for the night and listen to the emptiness, the nothingness."

"The Cochlear Implant enables me to live a full life enjoying family, friendships and all the beauty of a world full of sounds, songs and relationships."

The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital has been at the forefront of research and changes in cochlear implant technology including the first auditory brain stem implant in the Southern Hemisphere - a surgically-implanted hearing device, which is based on the concept of a cochlear implant, but directly stimulates the hearing nerve on the brain stem.

The Hospital opened the first public funded cochlear implant clinic in 1985 and since then has helped over one-thousand-three-hundred severely and profoundly deaf Victorians develop hearing and speech.

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