Ingeborg Hochmair

The idea of creating a company to develop and manufacture hearing implants was put to effect in the early eighties when she co-founded together with her husband Erwin Hochmair the medical device company MED-EL. The first employees were hired in 1990 and mark the beginning of the company. Since 2000 she has founded and co-founded multiple companies linked to the area of hearing loss and hearing implants.

With a next version of this device modified for better signal transparency, the next milestone in cochlear implant development was reached in March 1980: the understanding of words and sentences without lip-reading in a quiet environment via a small, body-worn sound processor. Over the years, about 500 devices were implanted in adults and children. Owing to the implant's very low power consumption and external processing, the world's first behind-the-ear (BTE) processor for a cochlear implant was designed in 1991. It was called COMFORT.

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. It had "8 channels, a stimulation rate of 10.000 pulses per second per channel, 8 independent current sources, and a flexible electrode for 22-25mm insertion into the cochlea." The first device was implanted on 16 December 1977 in Vienna by Prof. Kurt Burian followed by a second implantation in March 1978. Despite an early shunt in the first patient and some existing tinnitus in the second patient, place pitch could be demonstrated and the second patient could reliably discriminate and identify stimulation channels.

Ingeborg J. Hochmair-Desoyer (born 1953) is an Austrian electrical engineer from Technical University of Vienna. She helped create the first micro-electronic multi-channel cochlear implant in the world with her husband Prof. Erwin Hochmair. In 1980 she co-founded together with Prof. Erwin Hochmair the medical device company MED-EL and serves as its CEO and CTO. In 2013, she was honored together with two more scientists with the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for developing the modern cochlear implant.

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 was the first woman to do her PhD (with distinction)in 1979]. 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. Together with her husband she decided to move from Vienna to Innsbruck in 1986 where she taught (first as Assistant Professor and later as Associate Professor) at the Institute of Applied Physics Electronics of University of Innsbruck till 1999. In 1998 she achieved Venia Legendi (Univ. Doz.) in Biomedical Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Technical University of Vienna.