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Comment by blamestross | Hacker News Reader

They think the lithium ion battery inside will need to be replaced in 15 years.

I feel like implants like this should require an open connectivity standard between the stimulator in the cochlea and the processor.

A friend has a bone anchored hearing aid, with an osteointegrated post. The two different companies that make BAHAs use different posts. Which requires more surgery if they want to change brands. It could trivially be made compatible and swappable instead.

There is no vendor lock-in quite like prosthetic vendor lock-in.

Trusting a company for 15 years to keep making a replacement product seems crazy.

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Not quite; they estimate that the battery will hold at least 24 hours of charge after 15 years. Charging it back up takes one hour, and in the context of cochlear implants these are very good numbers. I think most people would be okay with a (let's say) 20-year reimplant cadence given the benefits of this technology - but this obviously depends on which country you happen to live in. I'm lucky enough to live in a place where cochlear implants (and the surgery) is free to whoever needs it.

They didn't test this in my house, that's certain.

I kinda view Lithium batteries as road flares with good PR. So that inside my body next to my brain seems..sketchy.

The other issue is that cutting it out and replacing it is the only option when the battery dies or goes wrong. If the product/company dies in the meantime, you have a bunch of scar tissue and no hearing. Replacing the "normally inside" bits of a cochlear implant is really high risk of not working as intended, so changing brands isn't a small ask. You really get to do this once. So putting the processor inside and tightly integrated with the nerve stimulation seems inadvisable. At least with the processor separated, you have a chance a compatible replacement processor could be made and exchanged without huge risks.

> I kinda view Lithium batteries as road flares with good PR. So that inside my body next to my brain seems..sketchy.

From "Trends in Cardiac Pacemaker Batteries" (2004) [0]

  The first implanted cardiac pacemaker used nickel-cadmium rechargeable battery, later on zinc-mercury battery was developed and used which lasted for over 2 years. Lithium iodine battery invented and used by Wilson Greatbatch and his team in 1972 made the real impact to implantable cardiac pacemakers. This battery lasts for about 10 years and even today is the power source for many manufacturers of cardiac pacemakers.

[0] <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1502062/>

Yeah, this desperately needs regulation. Any medical device that gets implanted in a patient's body requires the full designs to be part of the public record. Might fix all those unsecured wireless connections they love to leave in as well...

Like the bionic eye. We have a famous early-adopter in the country where I life. Sadly, she learnt quickly that going for this sort of tech was a bad idea, because the company producing/maintaining the thing went out of bussiness by now. Imagine the feeling. You have experimental tech inside your body, and nobody is able to maintain it these days.

> They think the lithium ion battery inside will need to be replaced in 15 years.

Pacemaker batteries have a 10 year replacement cycle and are lithium based, but don't get recharged (Just replaced). The concept of having to do this on a schedule is not that far fetched.

This is slightly conspiratorial but I suspect that hearing aid vendors lock-in people the same way through neural adaption.

If someone has profound high frequency deafness, no amount of amplification will help. High frequencies carry a lot of the information about consonants and are how we distinguish "t" from "s" etc.

So modern hearing aids do frequency remapping. A low frequency signal is produced within the range of hearing when those high frequency inputs are detected. The sharp 2500 and 6000 Hz peaks of an aspirated "t" become a sort of raspy tone at 1500 Hz, for example.

This is why they say you need to wear your hearing aids for at least some weeks before you notice a benefit. You're relearning language with the extra DSP sounds added. If you grow up with and wear hearing aids most of the time, your brain will be fully adapted to the DSP-speech.

Which is proprietary to the manufacturer. Every manufacturer uses a different algorithm. There's several ways to remap - the classic time vs. frequency multiplexing question. This (along with different noise reduction algorithms) explains why hearing aids from two different manufacturers can sound so very different.

I am being quasi-conspiratorial about it being an intentional lock-in. But one does wonder. In practice the method used by the hearing aids you grew up with is probably the only method you can make full use of.

Not to knock the technology. It's quasi-miraculous for some types of partial deafness. With plain amplification even at 95 dB my WRS is like 60%, while with hearing aids set at much lower 80 dB output average I get 100%.

Lots of information (albeit from the audiologist's perspective) about frequency lowering here: https://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/fitting-guide-frequ...

I have a IV port implant. The needles to use with it are licensed and very tightly controlled. It's not a prosthetic, but it is a part of my body I can't actually use without a company's permission.

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