Hi! You can visit my journal ( Building My Self Esteem ) to find out a lot more about the surgery and the requirements, but I can tell you the basic requirements: you must have a sensorineural hearing loss, a healthy middle ear, and have a speech discrimination score of 60% or better. They have allowed a group of patients to have a sd score between 40 and 60%, which is how I got in.
Because the implant is still under study for full FDA approval, the study MUST stay under strict guidelines approved by the FDA, meaning right now they can only accept patients who pass the current requirements. Back in 2005, my sd scores were great, but I had trouble understanding that voice on the cd, and I fell out of the requirements. The purpose of that particular cd test is to test your hearing with and without your hearing aids, to use as a comparison to your future results with the implant. Even though it was just that particular voice I had trouble with, they could not make a change just for me. I wasn't the only one who failed because of it.
As the study advances, the requirements to participate will become less strict. Right now, I have a moderate loss in my left ear, and a moderate/profoud loss in my right ear, yet both qualify. So who knows? If it's something you have an interest in, research it thoroughly and request the literature on it. Many people perfer to wait and see what happens with FDA approval and future testing. To each his own, right? =)
