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Informative Speech On Cochlear

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could you imagine a world where you aren’t able to hear a sound? Well, for hundreds of thousands of people this is unfortunately their reality. However, with advances in technology people are now able to hear for the first time and let me tell you, that’s certainly music to my ears. A new piece of medical technology known as the cochlear implant is a life changer that helps the deaf to live a normal life.
Anyone of any age who has highly impaired hearing loss or suffers from being deaf could have a cochlear implant. Damage to the inner ear, Aging, prolonged exposure to loud noise and diseases such as rubella (German measles) or mumps may cause wear and tear on the hairs or nerve cells in the cochlea that send sound signals to the brain. When …show more content…

The snail like shape of the cochlear effectively boosts the strength of the vibrations caused by sound, especially for low pitches. When sound waves hit the ear drum, tiny bones in the ear transmit the vibrations to the fluid of the cochlea, where they travel along a tube that winds into a spiral. The tube’s properties gradually change along its length, so the waves grow and then die away, much as an ocean wave travelling towards the shore gets taller and narrower before breaking at the beach.
Different frequencies reach their peak at different positions along the tube, which allows the cochlea to distinguish them. Researchers have found that the spiral shape significantly enhances the “vibrational motions” that translate into nerve signals. However, if the cochlear is damaged it is obvious how important the development of the cochlear implant is. Essentially the cochlear implant serves as a bypass for damaged sections of the ear, replacing the function of the ineffective hair cells.
The cochlear implant consists of 5 key components: a microphone, speech processor, transmitter, receiver/ stimulator and an electrode array. It is essential that all of these components operate with extreme precision in order for the brain to interpret the sounds it’s receiving, and this is where the physics gets …show more content…

During this moment the speech processor converts the sound signals heard through the microphone into digital signals. Following on, the digital signals are then sent through to the transmitter. The transmitter, which converts the digital signals into electric impulses, sends this signal through to the receiver/ stimulator using radio waves.
The receiver is located adjacently to the transmitter on the other side of the skull and attaches to the electrode array. These two components are internal devices, with the electrode array going through the ear canal and cochlear. The receiver induces the electric impulses along the electrode array to stimulate the hearing nerve fibres in the inner ear. Signals are then sent via the hearing nerve to the brain and recognised as sound.
However, perhaps the most phenomenal feature of the cochlear implant is how the device is powered. Due to there being no wires attached to the receiver from the other side of the skull, a method known as magnetic induction is used. Magnetic induction occurs when a circuit with an alternating current flowing through it generates current in another circuit simply by being placed within close proximity of it. Using a magnet that is surrounded by a coil allows for the magnetic field of the magnet to be induced in the wire of the

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