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The ChronicleHerald.ca
Dr. Manohar Bance has been looking for sweet spots in the human skull.
What he finds could lead to a major technological breakthrough for people with certain hearing impairments and spinoffs that could change how you listen to your IPod or cellphone and even how soldiers communicate on the battlefield.
Boosted by a $2.6-million grant from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency’s Atlantic Innovation Fund, the team he leads has embarked on a five-year project to change the tools used to channel the vibrations of sound through the skull to nerves in the inner ear, allowing people to hear even if they lack critical parts of the ear.
Along with his colleagues, Dr. Bance, an ear surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre and a Dalhousie University researcher treats about 40 Maritimers with conductive hearing loss each year by implanting bone-anchored hearing aids.
The procedure is well established and has become more widely used in recent years. But it requires opening the skull and carefully placing a titanium anchor inside — and the recipients have to be careful after surgery to ensure that the implant that protrudes from the back of the skull is kept clean. The implants can be difficult to use on children because their bones are still growing.
Dr. Bance wants to give patients the same benefit without putting them through surgery, an advance no one has been able to achieve in the more than 25 years since the technology was first used.
But he thinks he’s stumbled on a way. Experimenting with the device placed at different points on the head, he found certain locations where the sound it produced was louder than would be expected. That raised the possibility of a comfortable device that could be worn instead of being anchored to the skull.
"The biggest step in this whole thing is having the idea," Dr. Bance said. "It’s not intuitive. It’s surprising, actually, that it works. It’s contrary to what we know about bone conduction."
He and his partners, who include QEII surgeon Dr. David Morris, and scientists and engineers from Dal, the University of New Brunswick and the Department of National Defence, have developed simple prototypes. But several more steps are required before the idea becomes reality.
The terms of the ACOA grant require the team to have a commercial partner, so the first step has been months of negotiation with a business over royalties and patents.
That’s not a skill Dr. Bance learned in medical school.
"For many researchers, myself included, commercialization has been a dirty word in the past," he said.
But the reality is that developing a marketable product is sometimes critical to ensure therapeutic devices see the light of day.
"We have a lot of stuff in labs that never gets to patients," Dr. Bance said. "Unless we take it to a commercial partner and get it out, it never helps anybody."
To that end, the team needs to figure out how to conduct sound with fidelity, not simply enable deaf people to hear speech and environmental noise.
"Patients just want to hear," he said. "But if you’re going to play music on it, you want high fidelity."
A successful device could also be used by the military for covert communications.
"It’s a private listening channel," Dr. Bance said. "You can hear things that nobody else can hear around you and you can still keep hearing what everyone else is doing."
Once the project starts rolling, scientists will experiment with different vibrating materials and create sophisticated computer models to test designs and try to understand how the skull filters sound before trying the most promising examples on people.
That could happen within two or three years, he said.
With the support of the QEII Foundation, the group hopes to purchase a 3D laser Doppler vibrometer, a tool typically used by car designers and architects to see how vehicles and buildings vibrate. Dr. Bance believes it would be the first one in the world to be used in a research lab. In fact, he knows of only one other centre in the world studying bone conduction. And the Halifax ear surgeons are in a league by themselves in Canada, thanks to an alternative funding plan that allows them to be research-driven, Dr. Bance said.
He said he believes that when the partnerships are formed and the tools are in place, it won’t be a big jump to create a medically and commercially viable device. At that point, the groundwork will have been laid to establish Halifax as a centre of excellence in hearing technology.
"Once we go through this process we’ll be in a much better position for the next time around, the next technology," he said.
Dr. Manohar Bance has been looking for sweet spots in the human skull.
What he finds could lead to a major technological breakthrough for people with certain hearing impairments and spinoffs that could change how you listen to your IPod or cellphone and even how soldiers communicate on the battlefield.
Boosted by a $2.6-million grant from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency’s Atlantic Innovation Fund, the team he leads has embarked on a five-year project to change the tools used to channel the vibrations of sound through the skull to nerves in the inner ear, allowing people to hear even if they lack critical parts of the ear.
Along with his colleagues, Dr. Bance, an ear surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre and a Dalhousie University researcher treats about 40 Maritimers with conductive hearing loss each year by implanting bone-anchored hearing aids.
The procedure is well established and has become more widely used in recent years. But it requires opening the skull and carefully placing a titanium anchor inside — and the recipients have to be careful after surgery to ensure that the implant that protrudes from the back of the skull is kept clean. The implants can be difficult to use on children because their bones are still growing.
Dr. Bance wants to give patients the same benefit without putting them through surgery, an advance no one has been able to achieve in the more than 25 years since the technology was first used.
But he thinks he’s stumbled on a way. Experimenting with the device placed at different points on the head, he found certain locations where the sound it produced was louder than would be expected. That raised the possibility of a comfortable device that could be worn instead of being anchored to the skull.
"The biggest step in this whole thing is having the idea," Dr. Bance said. "It’s not intuitive. It’s surprising, actually, that it works. It’s contrary to what we know about bone conduction."
He and his partners, who include QEII surgeon Dr. David Morris, and scientists and engineers from Dal, the University of New Brunswick and the Department of National Defence, have developed simple prototypes. But several more steps are required before the idea becomes reality.
The terms of the ACOA grant require the team to have a commercial partner, so the first step has been months of negotiation with a business over royalties and patents.
That’s not a skill Dr. Bance learned in medical school.
"For many researchers, myself included, commercialization has been a dirty word in the past," he said.
But the reality is that developing a marketable product is sometimes critical to ensure therapeutic devices see the light of day.
"We have a lot of stuff in labs that never gets to patients," Dr. Bance said. "Unless we take it to a commercial partner and get it out, it never helps anybody."
To that end, the team needs to figure out how to conduct sound with fidelity, not simply enable deaf people to hear speech and environmental noise.
"Patients just want to hear," he said. "But if you’re going to play music on it, you want high fidelity."
A successful device could also be used by the military for covert communications.
"It’s a private listening channel," Dr. Bance said. "You can hear things that nobody else can hear around you and you can still keep hearing what everyone else is doing."
Once the project starts rolling, scientists will experiment with different vibrating materials and create sophisticated computer models to test designs and try to understand how the skull filters sound before trying the most promising examples on people.
That could happen within two or three years, he said.
With the support of the QEII Foundation, the group hopes to purchase a 3D laser Doppler vibrometer, a tool typically used by car designers and architects to see how vehicles and buildings vibrate. Dr. Bance believes it would be the first one in the world to be used in a research lab. In fact, he knows of only one other centre in the world studying bone conduction. And the Halifax ear surgeons are in a league by themselves in Canada, thanks to an alternative funding plan that allows them to be research-driven, Dr. Bance said.
He said he believes that when the partnerships are formed and the tools are in place, it won’t be a big jump to create a medically and commercially viable device. At that point, the groundwork will have been laid to establish Halifax as a centre of excellence in hearing technology.
"Once we go through this process we’ll be in a much better position for the next time around, the next technology," he said.