Long-term follow-up and review of the Bone Conduction Implant

Abstract

Active transcutaneous bone conduction devices are a type of bone conduction device developed to keep the skin intact and provide direct bone conduction stimulation. The Bone Conduction Implant (BCI) is such a device and has been implanted in 16 patients. The objective of this paper is to give a broad overview of the BCI development to the final results of 13 patients at 5-year follow-up. Follow-up of these patients included audiological performance investigations, questionnaires, as well as safety evaluation and objective functionality testing of the device. Among those audiological measurements were sound field warble tone thresholds, speech recognition threshold (SRT), speech recognition score (SRS) and signal to noise ratio threshold (SNR-threshold). The accumulated implant time for all 16 patients was 113 years in February 2022. During this time, no serious adverse events have occurred. The functional improvement for the 13 patients reported in this paper was on average 29.5 dB (average over 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 kHz), while the corresponding effective gain was -12.4 dB. The SRT improvement was 24.5 dB and the SRS improvement was 38.1%, while the aided SNR-threshold was on average -6.4 dB. It was found that the BCI can give effective and safe hearing rehabilitation for patients with conductive and mild-to-moderate mixed hearing loss.

Keywords: Active transcutaneous; Bone conduction; Bone conduction device; Bone conduction implant; Hearing rehabilitation; Implanted transducer.