Oticon Medical Neural Stimulation Philosophy: A different paradigm

Background: The way electrodes are driving electrical current is impacting the neural excitation. The resulting effects on human hearing sensations have been widely studied in the cochlear implant (CI) field among the past decades, specifically using different stimulation modes or electrical waveform. These efforts provided new insights and methodologies to steer the excitation beyond the normal range of electrode arrays, assess to more efficient or better focused stimulations, none or only a limited of these findings are actually used in commercialized CI systems which keep stimulating with the same gold-standard electrical parameters.

The Oticon Medical neural stimulation paradigm build on different characteristics. Low stimulation rate, loudness coding by pulse-duration, stimulation mode (Multi-Mode Grounding, MMG) and pulse waveform are all parameters that can be considered Oticon Medical unique in the CI field.

Material and methods: In-situ tests were conducted to measure the electric flow into a human dead body cochlea inserted with an EVO electrode array to quantify the MMG characteristics. A parametric cochlear model was developed to estimate the amount of electrical spread between the MMG, the Monopolar and the Bipolar modes. A series of animal objective measures was also developed in parallel to estimate the eCAP growth functions between pulse-amplitude and pulse-duration increment. These findings were compared with subjective loudness growth functions obtained in CI patients.

Conclusions : Oticon Medical aimed at highlighting the resulting effects of the stimulation paradigm on electrical spread of excitation, loudness growth function and literature knowledge. These effects are discussed in the following presentation.