Nowadays these implants must be quite common. At least I encounter people wearing ones regularly. If their life can get more convenient with an implantable version this is fantastic news.
A normal cochlea has 15-20.000 tonotopically mapped hair cells that turn mechanical movement into electric signals which the brain then turn into meaningful sound. The fact that the brain can also make sense of the electrical signals coming out of just twelve to sixteen little electrical contacts placed along a silicon noodle that gets shoved into the cochlea, and turn this crude signal into into speech and music, is nothing short of mind blowing!
There's been one person who was implanted, who had their natural hearing return for unknown reasons. So they can hear both cochlear, and quite well naturally in the same ear.
This let researchers at Arizona State University ask basically: what sounds most like the cochlear input? The various samples involving their research about 15 years ago are probably your best bet for what it sounds like.
Some people with musical training before retain the ability to hear arbitrary melodies with perfect pitch. Some do not.
There is basically no polyphony.
Even in the future, maybe sensor is advance enough so that even normal person may consider to get implant to have better vision ?
I ended up wanting a change and went and worked on the TIKI (Totally Implantable Cochlear (K?) Implant). During that time, Cochlear ran into some profit problems (circa 2000 ish?) and they did the redundancy thing for nearly everyone on the TIKI project. That was my first redundancy..
A TIKI device was eventually implanted in a volunteer subject. It was found to hear too much body/blood flow noise and was deemed unsuccessful. The device was made to operate as a normal implant as well, so they simply got an external speech processor and they were able to hear.
It would be interesting to hear how and how well Med-El managed to filter out the body noise from the internal device.
Often, engineering in Australia is hard to come by. We're a small nation in terms of population. If you've got a great idea and you have good people, you can still go far. Cochlear is one example. Resmed is the other Australian medical device success story. There are failure stories too like the Telectronics pacemaker whose wire insulation perished over time...
I'm really hoping QSAT (https://qsat.au/) will be another Australian success story. QSAT have a very neat satellite ground based comms system that can track and communicate with multiple satellites simultaneously. It's derived from the CSIRO phased array project. Unfortunately CSIRO looks like it's fading away. It is also harder for QSAT (probably most Oz startups?) to find startup capital in Oz. In the US you can pick up 0.5Mill of the side of the road....
I really do wish QSAT well. They have an innovative product and excellent people working on it.