Little Girl Gets New Ear And Cochlear Implant

In 1976 a paper (received Feb 1975) was published by Pialoux, Chouard and McLeod that stated that, in the six months before the paper being submitted, seven patients were implanted with an eight-channel device. Although it was reported that about 50% of ordinary words were understood without lipreading, this has not been supported by audiological data in the literature.
In 1972 the House 3M single-electrode implant was the first to be commercially marketed. However, it was Dr. Michelson's patents and ultimately device which are thought of as the first cochlear implants.
Parallel to the developments in California, in the 1970s there were two other groups working on the development of the cochlear implant in Vienna, Austria and Melbourne, Australia. On December 16, 1977 professor Kurt Burian implanted a multichannel cochlear implant. The device was developed by the scientists Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair, who founded MED-EL, producer of hearing implants, in 1989.
In December 1984, the Australian cochlear implant was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration to be implanted in adults in the United States. In 1990 the FDA lowered the approved age for implantation to two years, then 18 months in 1998, and finally 12 months in 2002, although off-label use has occurred in babies as young as 6 months in the United States and 4 months internationally.