title: A novel bone conduction implant (BCI): engineering aspects and pre-clinical studies.
abstract: Percutaneous bone anchored hearing aids (BAHA) are today an important rehabilitation alternative for patients suffering from conductive or mixed hearing loss. Despite their success they are associated with drawbacks such as skin infections, accidental or spontaneous loss of the bone implant, and patient refusal for treatment due to stigma. A novel bone conduction implant (BCI) system has been proposed as an alternative to the BAHA system because it leaves the skin intact. Such a BCI system has now been developed and the encapsulated transducer uses a non-screw attachment to a hollow recess of the lateral portion of the temporal bone. The aim of this study is to describe the basic engineering principals and some preclinical results obtained with the new BCI system. Laser Doppler vibrometer measurements on three cadaver heads show that the new BCI system produces 0-10 dB higher maximum output acceleration level at the ipsilateral promontory relative to conventional ear-level BAHA at speech frequencies. At the contralateral promontory the maximum output acceleration level was considerably lower for the BCI than for the BAHA.
authors.affiliation: Department of Signals and Systems, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden. boh@chalmers.se
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Håkansson
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Reinfeldt
authors.forename: Måns
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Eeg-Olofsson
authors.forename: Per
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ostli
authors.forename: Hamidreza
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Taghavi
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Adler
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gabrielsson
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stenfelt
authors.forename: Gösta
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Granström
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001844:Bone Conduction; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011474:Prosthesis Design; D019919:Prosthesis Implantation / Q000379:methods