Repair issues associated with cochlear implants external components: the influence of age and time of use

PURPOSE:to identify what are the most frequent technical flaws of the external components of the cochlear implant and verify the influence of age and the time of use of the device in these failures.METHODS:retrospective study. It was analyzed 128 medical records of the Association of Deaf Parents, Friends and Cochlear Implant Users, which presented a complaint in the functioning of the external component for the period from June to August 2011. For analysis of data was carried out the descriptive analysis of failed components, as well as the variables studied. It was applied to an inferential statistics through the Kruskal-Wallis test to analyze the influence of patient’s age and time of use of the cochlear implant with failure, with significance level p <0.05.RESULTS:the components that were more failure was the external antenna (29,7%), followed by the battery compartment (23,4%), speech processor (14,10%), microphone (10,90%), transmission cables (9,40%), controller (6,30%), batteries (5,50) and battery charge (0,80%). Has not been verified influence of time of use of the cochlear implant and the chronological age of the patient in relation to failures presented in this study.CONCLUSION:the findings obtained from this study can assist professionals in guidance on the maintenance of these components, but the trends presented here cannot be generalized to the entire national territory, as these were analyzed in a limited number of cases.