Category: blog

Introduction To rehabilitate patients with mixed hearing loss, implantable devices like the Vibrant Soundbridge middle ear implant (VSB) or percutaneous bone conductors (BCDs) have been applied. Such implantable devices become the next option whenever conventional hearing devices (e.g. behind-the-ear device) or reconstructive surgery are not possible or probably not effective (e.g. in case of aural atresia or chronic draining ears). Using recent publications, describing clinical trails, a comparison Read more [...]

Introduction. Originally, (conventional) bone-conduction devices (BCDs) comprised a bone vibrator pressed against the skin in the mastoid region. This so-called transcutaneous coupling works, but is not effective at all. Therefore, these conventional BCDs needed very powerful amplifiers. Nevertheless, the gain and output was limited and these devices were only applied if there was no acceptable alternative, thus as a ‘last resort’ solution (e.g. in case of aural atresia or chronic draining Read more [...]

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During the last decades, several new types of bone-conduction devices (BCDs) have been released for patients with conductive or mixed hearing loss. One rather recent innovation is the semi-implantable (transcutaneous) Sophono device (Medtronic; Jacksonville, Fl, USA), which is based on the Otomag device (Siegert et al., 2013; chapter 2, this website). This device makes use of a transcutaneous magnetic coupling between the externally worn conventional BCD and the skull. Recently, Bedzjian et al. (2017) Read more [...]