So this was a sorta presentation thing by the Cochlear company (thats the name of the company that makes the Nucleus 6 Implants). It went how you would expect a corporate thing to go, freebies (pens, rubbers leaflets and the bribe, I mean chocolates in the picture).
Then their was the presentation, all live text scribed as well (well they are dealing with people who can’t hear!) so it was not an issue for me to keep up with it for once! They talked about the company, you know the normal stuff for this sort of thing boils down to “we are great we do so much of this look at our shiny HQs!” not much interesting for me then they moved on to explaining the Nucleus 6 in quite a bit of detail:
- It has a nano coating to make it splash proof, also has additional expensive accessories (we are talking £30-160) for various ways to make it totally submersible (these range from “put it in a special cut plastic bag and stick it to your head” to a full plastic jacket not unlike a phone case but totally sealed in)
- Wireless accessories: a mini microphone that you can give to people to clip onto them or use it in a group situation by putting it on a table. A bluetooth phone clip thats basically a bluetooth headset but clips on to your body since the sound goes through the implant. And a TV streamer to stream that sound direct. The cool thing is though you can mix the sound from the wireless accessories with the sound coming from the processors microphones so you can hear both at the same time and control the balance between the two.
- They also mentioned a “in development” feature. Made for iPhone compatibility, not sure if they meant this is coming for the Nucleus 6 or a future processor model they only said “in the future” but it looks like the audio streaming and using an iPhone app to control the implant like you would with the remote control that comes with it. Handy since well you would not have to have the remote you could just use an iPhone, also had a feature called find the processor, for all those times you misplace it, considering I do that all the time with hearing aids at home (not when out and about) that will be handy!
They also mentioned something about including accessories with your implant order, so not sure (i should of asked it did not occur to me at the time) if that means that I can pick some accessories when choosing the implant/colour with the NHS picking up the tab or you add them on to the order and well I pay. Hmm either way I can see that mini microphone being the first must have thing, still don’t quite believe that ill be able to talk on the phone with this at all. but we will see.
After that presentation they had a current cochlear implant user give a speech, answer questions and so on. The one thing I came away from with that was he did not struggle to understand people speaking at all, I have no idea how his actual speech was, my parents never said anything odd about it. But he had no trouble talking and engaging with the room. So I guess thats proof it can work eh?
Itchy Implanted 