Dear Colleague: I am pleased to announce that we recently received approval from the Health Canada to begin marketing Nucleus® Freedom™ – an incredible innovation in cochlear implant systems. Nucleus Freedom! We’re excited about the new name! Extensive market research conducted around the world with both professionals and cochlear implant users concludes that “Freedom” describes participating and interacting with the world of sound. Nucleus Freedom is designed to provide your patients with enhanced hearing performance in all listening situations -- at home, school, work or play. Like previous Cochlear innovations, Nucleus Freedom delivers several industry firsts:

• The SmartSound™ digital microchip drives Nucleus Freedom system performance. The chip has temporal resolution capability that has 1000 times finer timing accuracy than 5000 pps fixed rate strategies; it is designed to handle a broad range of future enhancements in speech coding strategies.
• The SmartSound™ suite, which delivers proprietary innovation in digital sound technology, is designed to enable better hearing in a multitude of everyday listening situations. Only from Cochlear, and the newest innovation in the suite, SmartSound BEAM™ shows a 6-15dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio in early studies, depending on the noise condition tested ¹.
• Hi-ACE, an evolution of the popular ACE™ coding strategy, provides access to increased stimulation rates of up to 32 kHz, and continues to deliver the only available coding strategy that combines both the spectral resolution of SPEAK and the temporal cues of CIS.
• The world’s first water resistant speech processor so your patients can enjoy the sounds that are an important part of sailing on the lake or running through the sprinkler.
• Simplified and improved Auto-NRT, for completely automatic T-NRT recording, delivers 95.3% algorithm success rate².

I am sure that you share our enthusiasm for this new system and want to know when you can begin offering Nucleus Freedom to your patients. Attached on the next page is a summary of important dates for making this exciting technology broadly available.

If you have any questions about this or would like more information, please do not hesitate to contact me, or any member of your Customer Care team.

Sincerely,
Chris M. Smith
President, Cochlear Americas

Richard L. Giancola
Vice President Sales Latin America & Canada