Bionic experts meet in Australia
Updated
Twenty years ago, researchers in Australia revolutionised life for the deaf community, developing the first bionic ear - the cochlear implant. It can help profoundly deaf people to hear and communicate. Bionics has moved on a lot since then, with scientists hard at work on bionic eyes, therapies to help paralysed people regain movement and even treatments for diseases of the brain. This week, Australia is hosting the world's first medical bionics conference, bringing together more than 150 experts on bionics from 12 countries.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Conference organiser and head of Australia's Bionic Ear Institute, Professor Rob Shepherd
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DR ROB SHEPHERD: There's been 120,000 people implanted around the world with these devices and before 1980 there was nothing that we could do for profoundly deaf patients. Now many of the patients, including very young children, receive these devices and communicate on mobile phones like I'm talking to you now.
SEN LAM: So is the bionic ear still being studied and perhaps improved upon?
DR ROB SHEPHERD: Absolutely. There's still a lot to improve with the bionic ear and in particular there's two main areas of improvement we need to make. First of all, the patients with a bionic ear using it in a noisy environment find speech understanding still difficult. So we still have to improve the bionic ear in a noisy environment. Secondly, we have to improve the bionic ear improvement for appreciation of music and tonal languages - some of the bionic ear speech processing doesn't work all that well for music appreciation.
SEN LAM: And, Rob Shepherd, I understand the meeting at Lorne is also looking at bionic eyes and bionic applications for paralysed people, how far along is that work?
DR ROB SHEPHERD: The bionic eye work is very interesting. We're using some of the knowledge and technology that has been gained over 30 years with bionic ears and reapplying that to these other medical bionic devices. So, there are groups in the world that have a small number of patients and clinical trials at the moment with the bionic eye using small numbers of electrodes. What we're interested in doing is increasing the number of electrodes really, in an effort to increase the resolution of bionic eye device so a blind patient would be able to walk unaided using their bionic eye device. It's a huge technological challenge and we hope that in four or five years time we might have some initial clinical applications in that area.
SEN LAM: And of course many members of our audience would remember the American actor Christopher Reeves who played Superman and he was paralysed after falling off a horse. Are advances being made in helping people like him who are paralysed?
DR ROB SHEPHERD: Yes. Again, we heard a wonderful paper this morning at the conference from a Canadian researcher, Vivian Mushahwar. And her group is placing tiny electrodes into a key part of the spinal cord, direct stimulate nerves in the spinal cord but can help control muscle movement and allow paraplegic and quadriplegic patients the possibility of standing and even in the future walking. This work is still very much at an experimental stage but her experimental animal results have very, very encouraging.
SEN LAM: And, Rob Shepherd, many people would say that yours is a very useful science but I understand there's also presentations from ethicists. What kind of ethical issues are involved here?
DR ROB SHEPHERD: Well, we must make sure that the engineers and the scientists developing these devices only prepare and implant patients in the clinical trial after we've gone through the appropriate reviews from ethics committees. So ethics committees play a major role to make sure that the device that we've developed is suitable and ready to be implanted in a human subject.
