Yet another Aussie invention too i believe :-)
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.