Restoring hearing with neural prostheses: Current status and future directions

This chapter provides a brief history and description of the cochlear implant, which is considered one of the most successful neural prostheses to date. Although the cochlear implant can provide good speech perception in many patients with severe to profound hearing loss, its performance degrades dramatically in noisy environments and for more complex inputs such as music and multiple talkers. The successes and challenges faced by the cochlear implant over the past few decades are presented in this chapter, along with several encouraging opportunities for significantly improving hearing performance with cochlear implants and more central auditory prostheses. The chapter concludes with several novel approaches for pushing the field of auditory prostheses towards more natural hearing.