A cochlear implant gives a deaf person hearing

A microphone behind the ear turns sound into electrical pulses, and a thin wire threaded into the inner ear delivers them straight to the hearing nerve, skipping the damaged parts of the ear. People who were profoundly deaf hear speech again, and children born deaf learn to talk. It is the most widely used sensory implant there is, and the only upgrade on this branch at the top of the ladder.

What would count

A person who was profoundly deaf, fitted with an implant that stimulates the hearing nerve electrically, can understand spoken words without lip-reading, as measured by a standard speech test in a peer-reviewed report; the device is approved by a regulator and used by a counted population in the hundreds of thousands.

Who settles it: Regulator approval records (the United States Food and Drug Administration and others) and a public count of users from a national health institute or the makers' own reports

Where it stands

In wide use. Reached on 31 December 2019, on the record of nidcd.nih.gov. At the top of the ladder; nothing left to reach.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Read monthly, as an entry at the top of the ladder. No withdrawal and no new count in the window. The only regulatory item found is an open class 2 recall of Advanced Bionics' HiResolution system, begun 2026-04-30 and posted by the FDA on 2026-06-01, which is a recall of one maker's product line and not a withdrawal of cochlear implants. No newer worldwide count than the institute's figure of about 736,900 registered devices as of December 2019 was found from a primary source.

Notes

The in-wide-use record is the fact sheet of the United States National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, which gives a count of registered devices worldwide (about 736,900 as of December 2019, on a page last updated in June 2024); the makers' own figures are higher and newer, and the date here is the end of the month the count refers to. The in-clinical-use record is the FDA's approval of the first multichannel implant for adults on 31 October 1985; approval for children followed in June 1990. The first-human record is the 1957 report in a French medical journal by Djourno and Eyriès of a deaf man hearing through an electrode placed on the hearing nerve that February; the original has no web page of its own, so the library index entry is linked.