Jerry Schloffman, vice president of marketing for Advanced Bionics, likes to acquaint himself with the personal stories of recipients of his company’s cochlear implant devices. After learning of Lauren White’s operation, he was enthusiastic about the opportunity for vast developmental growth in such a young patient.

Q: What do you think of this little girl’s journey?

A: It’s exciting to see children so young get implanted. The success of implants goes up a great deal when the child gets them at a young age. Perhaps more important is fact that she’s getting two. This is a fairly new trend. We’re seeing it more and more. The likelihood of this child developing normal language skills is significantly increased by the decision to go the bilateral route. There’s a recent study out that found the quality of life is greatly enhanced with two implants.

Living with the barrier of hearing, your child is going to have trouble in school, not be able to use the telephone, have more safety risks. So most parents, given the chance to eliminate that issue, choose to do it.

It takes a really progressive surgeon and hospital to tackle a simultaneous bilateral implant on a child. There’s no reason why — with the right therapy, with the right surgeon, with the right rehabilitation — she can’t develop age-appropriate skills.

Q: What’s the sound quality going to be like with Lauren’s model?

A: The cochlea is only the size of a pea, and in there are 20,000 hair cells. This hi-res Harmony device replaces those (nonfunctioning) hair cells with 16 electrodes. Imagine each electrode is a piano key. If someone plays you a song using just those 16 keys, you might be able to recognize the song, but it wouldn’t sound quite right. We turn those 16 electrodes into 120 bands so the sound comes through much richer and clearer. There’s an ability to deliver 120 channels. It sounds more representative of what you and I expect to hear because you’ve got all the keys and then some. So there’s a higher level of sound expectation.

And 120 channels are not the end point. There are opportunities to make it even better. We’ll introduce Lauren and her family to advances when they come about. We’ll be able to upgrade her model with software and external equipment, and that’s important from an upgrade standpoint because it’s not like there’s a zipper up there for easy access to the implanted component. So we don’t have to reimplant.

Q: Music is very important to this family. Will Lauren be able to appreciate that level of sound?

A: Five years ago, if you got an implant, the likelihood that music would be enjoyable was much less than today. Listening to music — with the range of frequencies and level of information — was never within the realm of possibility. They called them speech processors for a reason. Now we call them sound processor. Music never used to be on the radar screen for the profoundly hard of hearing. Now it is.

There’s even (a jack) on her speech processor so she can plug it directly into an iPod. She can go right over to the trial station and Borders with her friends to listen to music. We want to give her the opportunity to join choir or band if she wants.