cochlear implant testing devices

Implantable hearing device company Cochlear Ltd, needed to refine and develop a skin flap thickness tester and a coil tuning frequency tester to collect data about the performance of a recipient’s cochlear implant.

Duration

12 months

industry

Medical and Scientific

expertise

Industrial Design
Mechanical Engineering

Cochlear had built rudimentary laboratory tools to conduct cochlear implant testing.

They needed these specialised tools to be refined and further developed for clinical use.

We worked with technical researchers at Cochlear and observed the test environment and the processes used at Cochlear clinics to see how clinicians use the devices and understand the patient experience.

We built and developed ergonomic mockups of the devices and tested them in the clinical environment.

Our designers and engineers refined and developed full electronic and mechanical prototypes.

The implant testing devices are used in-house at Cochlear headquarters in Australia, and at international Cochlear sites, to gather implant data to feed back into ongoing research and development.

"outerspace proved to be the ideal partner working closely with our hardware design, manufacturing and software teams around the world to realise our vision"

“Our long association with outerspace has delivered substantial benefits to our development process. This has resulted in medical products that now receive international attention and are achieving record sales.”

“A broad range of industry experience from the outerspace team challenged our assumptions and led to a much better design solution.”