Meet the Woman Behind the Modern-Day Cochlear Implant: Ingeborg Hochmair

We all have childhood dreams. It might be to star in an Oscar-winning film. Or to fly to space with NASA. But Ingeborg Hochmair’s dream was clear. She wanted to use medical devices to help people. And after studying electrical engineering, her calling became even clearer. She was going to help people hear.

Early Ambitions

Born in Vienna in 1953, the daughter of a physicist and a mechanical engineering professor, science was always a passion for Ingeborg. In fact, she already knew at the age of 13 what her calling was: She wanted to help people improve their quality of life through technology.

With this goal in mind, Ingeborg started studying electrical engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1975, her future husband, Erwin Hochmair, asked her to join him on a project to develop a cochlear implant. Two years later, the world’s first microelectronic multichannel cochlear implant was implanted.

This pioneering work led to her becoming the first woman in Austria to receive a PhD in electrical engineering.

From Speech Understanding to Telephone Calls

One of the first cochlear implant recipients was Connie. She would come to the Hochmairs’ lab and spend hours and hours doing tests, helping them develop the first speech coding strategies. By 1980, Connie could understand speech with her cochlear implant. It was an achievement that many people doubted when Ingeborg and Erwin started their project.

But Hochmair’s mission was far from complete. After moving to Innsbruck in the late eighties, she and Erwin founded MED-EL, hiring their first employees in 1990.

Four years later, MED-EL launched the COMBI 40 system, an eight-channel high-rate cochlear implant. Study results showed that after just six months, most recipients’ speech understanding was good enough for a telephone call with an unknown speaker.

Hard Work Pays Off

Dr. Hochmair pushed forward with her goal of helping improve quality of life. After 30 years of ongoing development, today’s cochlear implants are almost unrecognizable. They can stream podcasts and connect with apps. Their audio processors weigh less than a AAA battery and hide behind the ear. And the sound quality and coding has improved to such an extent that people can communicate in loud environments and enjoy music.

Because of Hochmair’s determination to fulfill her childhood ambitions, there are hundreds of thousands of MED-EL cochlear implant recipients from over 170 different countries.

Looking to the Future

There are still more people out there who could hear with the help of a CI. For every child that receives a cochlear implant, there are three more that could benefit from a CI—but don’t get one.

With new innovations like remote fitting, robot-assisted surgery, and totally implantable cochlear implants, hearing solutions could become more accessible to more people. After all, it’s been almost 50 years since Ingeborg’s first CI was implanted. Let’s see what the next years bring.