Ingeborg J. Hochmair-Desoyer (born 1953) is an Austrian electrical engineer and the CEO and CTO of hearing implant company MED-EL. Dr Hochmair and her husband Prof. Erwin Hochmair co-created the first micro-electronic multi-channel cochlear implant in the world. She received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions towards the development of the modern cochlear implant. She also received the 2015 Russ Prize for bioengineering. In 1989, she co-founded the medical device company MED-EL.
Biography Ingeborg Hochmair was born in 1953 in Vienna, Austria. Her mother was a physicist and her father was dean of the faculty of mechanical engineering at Vienna University of Technology. Her grandmother was one of the first female chemical engineers in Austria. She commenced her studies at Technical University of Vienna in electrical engineering in 1971, and in 1975, she became the first woman in Austria to receive a PhD in electrical engineering. Her dissertation was on the "Technical realization and psychoacoustic evaluation of a system for multichannel chronic stimulation of the auditory nerve." From 1976 to 1986, she worked as assistant professor at the Institute of General Electrical Engineering and Electronics at Technical University of Vienna. She also worked at Stanford University's Institute for Electronics in Medicine as a Visiting Associate Professor in 1979. In 1986, she moved from Vienna to Innsbruck, where she taught (first as Assistant Professor and later as associate professor) at the Institute of Applied Physics Electronics of University of Innsbruck until 1989. In 1998 she achieved Venia Legendi (Univ. Doz.) in biomedical engineering at the faculty of electrical engineering of Technical University of Vienna. In 1989, Hochmair co-founded the hearing implant company MED-EL, along with husband Erwin Hochmair. She remains CEO and CTO of the company. Outside of MED-EL, Hochmair continues to support research in the field of science and technology. In 2012, an endowed professorship in microelectronics and implantable systems was introduced at the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Mechatronics, supported by Hochmair. The University of Innsbruck also offers Ingeborg Hochmair Professorships, an endowed professorship aimed at supporting female researchers in science and technology.
Research & Other Work In 1975, Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair started the cochlear implant development at Technical University of Vienna with the overall goal of enabling the user not only to hear sounds but also to provide some speech understanding. Together they developed the world's first microelectronic multi-channel cochlear implant. This implant included a long, flexible electrode, which could, for the first time, deliver electric signals to the auditory nerve along a large part of the cochlea, the snail-shaped inner ear. The new multi-channel device was implanted in December 1977 in Vienna by Dr Kurt Burian. Testing various sound processing strategies with this device, ranging from single-channel quasi-analog stimulation to more complex patterns, failed to produce open speech understanding. However, when a single broadband channel with analog-style stimulation was tried, the patient showed some rudimentary speech comprehension and lip-reading support. This finding changed the direction of their research program. The Hochmairs decided that their approach in making complex microelectronic implants was premature, and they pivoted to researching simpler passive implants that were easier to construct and modify. In 1979, a passive transcutaneous four-channel implant developed by the Hochmairs allowed a woman to understand some open-set speech without lip-reading in a quiet environment. However, the speech coding strategy stimulated the best-performing single electrode rather than using multiple channels simultaneously, making this functionally closer to a single-channel approach..
3M/Vienna single-channel cochlear implant In 1981, the 3M Corporation entered into a licence and support agreement with the Vienna group involving the commercialisation of their cochlear implant system, and the device subsequently became known as the 3M/Vienna cochlear implant. Clinical evaluations demonstrated that some patients could achieve substantial open-set word recognition without visual cues. However, a redesign that replaced the intracochlear electrode with an extracochlear electrode resulted in diminished speech performance, and 3M's commercial involvement ultimately ended. Comparative studies found that, while the Vienna single-channel implant provided meaningful auditory benefit, multi-channel designs from other manufacturers generally allowed users to recognise more environmental sounds and understand speech more effectively in sound-only conditions. The Vienna group subsequently founded MED-EL in 1990 in order to pursue a multi-channel design incorporating Blake Wilson's CIS-strategy. Through MED-EL, Hochmair has led many further advances in hearing implant research, including the introduction of a behind-the-ear audio processor in 1991, new sound coding strategies, and the development of single-unit audio processors. A totally implantable cochlear implant is currently in development. The cochlear implant is the first device to actually replace a human sense Not only that, but it addresses hearing loss, which is number six on the list of the world's most significant disease burdens Hochmair has over 40 patents to her name, all of which are for components of her cochlear implant. Many of the patents were updated or improved versions of older components for which she filed a new patent. A fairly comprehensive, but incomplete, list of her patents are as follows:
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
