Health Sciences · Hospital for Sick Children
A dark grey plastic enclosure with 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 from the body-worn enclosure.
A lid at the rear of the unit can be removed to reveal the battery compartment and a socket, presumably for programming the unit.
Accession Number: 2025.sk.51
Alternative Name:
Primary Materials: Metal, Plastic
Stamped into the base of the enclosure: “S/N 343895”
Moulded into the body of the earpiece: “RGO” (perhaps “R60”)
Height = 9.5, Width = 2, Length = 6; 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 body-worn system, which became available in the mid 1990s, was an upgrade to the earlier body-worn Mini Speech Processor. It offered an improved speech processing algorithm, namely the SPEAK coding strategy, developed at the University of Melbourne (see Skinner et al. 1994).
This example appears intact and is in good condition.
Associated Instruments:
Manufacturer: Cochlear Pty, ltd. Sydney, Australia
Date of Manufacture: Mid 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 lab’s founding in 1998.
These items remain on site and in possession of the Lab. They are used for teaching and demonstration purposes.
Margaret W. Skinner et al. (1994). “Evaluation of a New Spectral Peak Coding Strategy for the Nucleus 22 Channel Cochlear Implant System.” The American Journal of Otology (New York, N.Y.) 15 Suppl 2: 15.
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.
Cochlear, ltd. was founded in 1981 based on developmental research into cochlear implants by a group led by Dr. Graeme Clark at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This followed a decade of research in areas such as biocompatible materials and safe thresholds of electrical stimulation with the cochlea. The company’s first-generation cochlear implant system, based on the Cl22 implant, was commercially released for adults in 1985. (See Patrick, Busby, and Gibson 2006, 177.)