Most of us have experienced tinnitus following a long night at a concert hall, with the sensation normally going away after a few hours. For some, though, the ringing in the ears is a constant of life that just doesn’t go away. It can have many causes, but usually it’s due to nerve or hair cell damage within the ear, triggering the perception of sound by the brain when there is none. Now a new device called mutebutton from Neuromod Devices (Dublin, Ireland) has been cleared in Europe to treat subjective tinnitus, overwhelmingly the most common form of the condition.
The mutebutton relies on multi-sensory integration (MSI), the way we naturally combine information from different sensory organs, to trick the brain to react to real sounds and to ignore ones arising from the brain itself. A patch with an array of electrodes is placed on the tongue and a pair of headphones is worn by the patient. The control unit to which the components are plugged into transmits gentle audio to the headphones while energizing the electrodes at the same time. This purportedly teaches the brain to associate real sounds with real stimulation of the tongue, eventually resulting in fewer episodes of tinnitus and reduced perceived volume when it does happen.
Product page: mutebutton…
Press release: NEUROMOD DEVICES LTD SECURES CE MARK FOR MUTEBUTTON™ MULTISENSORY TINNITUS TREATMENT…