A flexible auditory brain implant

This article is taken from the monthly Sciences et Avenir n°940, dated June 2025.

For patients suffering from deafness and whose auditory nerve is too damaged to benefit from cochlear implants, a Swiss team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has just presented a device to be placed directly on the brainstem.

Electrodes embedded in a silicone layer

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Unlike previous prototypes, which were too rigid to fit the nervous tissue, this one is made of electrodes integrated into a layer of silicone, forming a flexible device less than a millimeter thick!

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