  In the present contribution, we introduce a wireless optical
communication-based system architecture which is shown to significantly improve
the reliability and the spectral and power efficiency of the transcutaneous
link in cochlear implants (CIs). We refer to the proposed system as optical
wireless cochlear implant (OWCI).In order to provide a quantified understanding
of its design parameters, we establish a theoretical framework that takes into
account the channel particularities, the integration area of the internal unit,
the transceivers misalignment, and the characteristics of the optical units. To
this end, we derive explicit expressions for the corresponding average
signal-to-noise-ratio, outage probability, ergodic spectral efficiency and
capacity of the transcutaneous optical link (TOL). These expressions are
subsequently used to assess the dependence of the TOL's communication quality
on the transceivers design parameters and the corresponding channels
characteristics. The offered analytic results are corroborated with respective
results from Monte Carlo simulations. Our findings reveal that OWCI is a
particularly promising architecture that drastically increases the reliability
and effectiveness of the CI TOL, whilst it requires considerably lower transmit
power compared to the corresponding widely-used radio frequency (RF) solution.
