Cochlear program to give deaf children best start to life Six-year-old twins Ben and Lochie Baulch both have cochlear implants. DEAF children as young as four months old will be able to hear sooner, through a new Melbourne-designed system of programming cochlear implants. The sooner a deaf child receives a hearing aide or cochlear implant, the bigger gains they make in speech and listening. But it can take many months - vital time for a developing brain - for the implant to be programmed because clinicians cannot rely on feedback from children about the volume. The Bionics Institute's Professor Colette McKay has been lured back to Australia as a senior veski innovation fellow to continue developing the system that measures the response in the brain to sound. The $200,000 award over three years - to be announced tonight - will ensure her new bionic hearing technology is developed on home soil. Prof McKay has spent the past nine years leading the audiology and deafness research group at Manchester University, and she worked with cochlear implant inventor Professor Graeme Clark on the original device. Prof McKay's program works by using the electrodes already in the implant to measure the response to sound in the hearing part of the brain, rather than in the hearing nerve. Clinicians will then be able to determine the exact settings for each implant and automatically program them in the clinic. ``There is a very sensitive period very early on in a baby's life where their brain is being tuned to learn language," Prof McKay said. ``The earlier deaf children get a hearing aide or cochlear implant, the much better outcome they have in language development. This new predictive technology will allow deaf children like six-year-old twins Ben and Lochie Baulch, who received cochlear implants at eight and 10 months of age, to start hearing sooner. ``To get a reliable hearing test for a kid that age is really hard," said mum Naomi. ``They can't say; `I can hear that', or drop a marble. You have to spend three weeks training them to turn their head to look at a picture. ``To test if you're hurting them with sound, you have to look for a blink, an intake of breath or body language language to know if you need to knock back the volume. ``Ben would never have spoken without the implant. He heard nothing at all. ``But now they both speak beautifully, they read, they play music like normal little boys. The remaining veski awards will be announced by Minster for Innovation, Services and Small Business, Louise Asher, tonight.