Advanced Bionics - Technology that brings back the sound of life
For over 30 years, a world leader in cochlear implantation has been helping children and adults hear the world — and today these technologies are available to every patient in Kazakhstan.
A history born from a mission
Advanced Bionics was founded in 1993 in California, USA, with a single goal — to restore hearing to people for whom conventional hearing aids no longer help. From its earliest days, the company focused on cochlear implantation: a technology that bypasses damaged areas of the inner ear and directly stimulates the auditory nerve with electrical impulses.
Over the following decades, the company became one of the industry's global leaders, amassing over 400 patents and developing a number of breakthrough technologies now considered the gold standard in cochlear implantation.
Part of the Sonova Group and the Phonak legacy
Since 2009, Advanced Bionics has been a subsidiary of the Swiss Sonova Group, the world's largest organization specializing in hearing technology. The Phonak, Unitron, AudioNova, Hansaton and Advanced Bionics brands are all united under one roof. This partnership gave cochlear implantation something no manufacturer had ever had before: direct access to decades of Phonak's engineering work in sound processing.
What does this mean in practice? Advanced Bionics' speech processors use Phonak's patented algorithms — such as UltraZoom (directional microphone technology) and ClearVoice (automatic isolation of speech from noise). These same technologies have been refined for decades in Phonak hearing aids and now serve cochlear implant users too.
The result is a bimodal system: a patient with an implant in one ear and a Phonak hearing aid in the other gets a single, cohesive sound experience — music, phone calls and FM signals streamed wirelessly to both devices at once. This is a unique capability that no other cochlear implant manufacturer in the world offers.
Key technologies
A public company: transparency as a guarantee of reliability
What does "public company" mean?
The parent company, Sonova Holding AG, trades on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX Swiss Exchange) under the ticker SOON. This means anyone in the world can buy shares in the company and become a co-owner.
In simple terms: a public company is an organization that is "open" to the whole world. Its financial results, strategy, and research and development spending are published in mandatory reports available to everyone. The company's activities are monitored by thousands of investors, independent auditors and stock exchange regulators.
For a patient, this has a very concrete meaning. A company with this status can't quietly exit the market, wind down support programs, or discontinue spare parts without a public announcement. Sonova invests significant funds in research and development every year — and these figures are open for scrutiny. A patient who receives a cochlear implant today can be confident: ten years from now, the manufacturer won't have disappeared, support will continue, and the technology will keep evolving.
Why this matters for Kazakhstan
According to the World Health Organization, more than 5% of the world's population — around 360 million people — live with hearing loss. In Kazakhstan, thousands of children are born with congenital hearing loss every year, and hundreds of people lose their hearing annually due to illness, injury or age-related changes. Without timely intervention, this means isolation, delayed speech development in children, and lost professional opportunities for adults.
Cochlear implantation is more than just a medical procedure. It's an investment in a full life: in a child's education, their social integration, their ability to hear their mother's voice, music, a teacher's words. Every successfully implanted child is a person who will go to a regular school, find a job, and become a full member of society.
Advanced Bionics' presence in Kazakhstan through an official distributor means that residents of the republic gain access to world-class technology without having to travel abroad. Specialist support, processor fitting and calibration, and rehabilitation programs are all available here, in the country, in their native language.
What every patient gets
Choosing Advanced Bionics isn't just choosing a medical device. It's entry into a support ecosystem that works throughout the patient's entire life. An implant placed today is capable of receiving software updates and connecting to future generations of speech processors without repeat surgery. This means technological progress will keep serving the patient again and again — without additional surgical intervention.
The AutoSound system automatically adapts to the acoustic environment — whether it's a quiet room, a busy street or a school classroom. Technology inherited from Phonak ensures speech clarity even in challenging noisy conditions. And compatibility with Roger accessories lets children receive their teacher's voice directly in the processor during class — without loss or distortion.