Health Sciences · Hospital for Sick Children
A dark grey plastic enclosure with rounded edges. A series of buttons, as well as a small LCD screen, are arranged on its front face. A beige earpiece attached to its upper surface by a beige cord. A circular, dark brown external transmitting coil is attached to the earpiece by another short cord.
A side compartment with a hinged lid can be opened to reveal the socket for the corded elements. The lid is designed in such a way as to prevent accidental detachment of the cord from the body-worn enclosure. The battery compartment is accessed by a hinged lid on the same side.
Accession Number: 2025.sk.52
Alternative Name:
Primary Materials: Metal, Plastic
Faded printing on the front and back panels reads: “DEMO UNIT// NOT FUNCTIONING”
A white label on the back panel reads: “CAUTION// Investigational device.// Limited by U. S. Law// to investigational use.// N21064F ISS2 SEP94”
A small grey label on the back panel features the CE (Conformité Européenne) logo and the number “0197”.
A white manufacturer’s label on the back panel includes “SP5” and “IP44”
The word “DEMO” is written on the earpiece.
Height = 9, Width = 2.5, Length = 6.5; Corded element is about 1 m long.
Cochlear implants are used for severely to profoundly deaf patients for whom acoustic amplification offers no benefit. A cochlear implant stimulates the auditory nerve tissue directly using electrical signals in order to create a sensation of hearing.
A cochlear implant consists of two separate components, an internal element with an electrode array implanted within the cochlea, and an externally worn component. The external element contains such things as a microphone, a battery, a sound processing system, and a transmitter that sends the sound signal and power to the implant.
This is an example of the external elements of a cochlear implant system. This is an early demonstration example of a body-worn system, which became commercially available in the late 1990s. It offered an improved version of the SPEAK coding strategy used in the earlier Spectra 22 Speech Processor (see Waltzman, Cohen, and Roland 1999.)
This unit appears complete and in good cosmetic condition. Labelling indicates that it was build as a non-functioning demo unit.
Associated Instruments:
Manufacturer: Cochlear Pty, ltd. Sydney, Australia.
Date of Manufacture: c. Mid-to-late 1990s
This is part of a small collection of artifacts, gathered by Archie’s Cochlear Implant Lab at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), that was photographed on 8 October 2025. The items represent various stages of the technology used since the labs founding in 1998.
These items remain on site and in possession of the Lab. They are used for teaching and demonstration purposes.
Susan B, Waltzman, Noel L. Cohen, and J. Thomas Roland, Jr. (1999) “A Comparison of the Growth of Open-Set Speech Perception between the Nucleus 22 and Nucleus 24 Cochlear Implant Systems.” The American Journal of Otology (New York, N.Y.) 20, no. 4: 435–41.
James F. Patrick, Peter A Busby, and Peter J Gibson (2006). “The Development of the Nucleus® FreedomTM Cochlear Implant System.” Trends in Amplification 10, no. 4: 175–200.
Historical Notes: