CI Peer Badge — Thursday Review

Badge in context — Mentor profile card

New element: the CI badge sits between the name/role and the device details. One line; derived from onboarding data already collected (FR3.4a).

Talking points

Why the badge exists: making "Mentor" land

MED-EL's own June workshop confirmed the term "Mentor" doesn't translate consistently across markets. The CI peer badge gives the role a concrete, universally legible meaning — "this person has lived with a cochlear implant for 11 years" — without depending on the abstract label.

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Decision locked: implant type + year, not processor model

Processors are upgraded; implants aren't. A Mentor implanted in 2015 may have used OPUS 2 → SONNET → SONNET 3 across nine years. "SONNET 3 since 2015" would be factually wrong. The implantation year marks the stable start of the CI journey — the meaningful anchor for any Candidate evaluating who to trust.

Processor details remain visible in the full profile card (FR3.4b) for device matching — the badge handles credibility, the card handles compatibility.

Evidence base

Peer-reviewed mentorship literature confirms experienced CI users are high-value guides: Diffenthal et al. (2026) and Bleckly (2024) both document structured CI volunteer partnerships, and one analysis found an average ~27-year implant duration in active peer-support contexts. No commercial CI platform (Cochlear, Advanced Bionics, MED-EL public-facing) currently surfaces implant duration as an explicit credibility signal. This is a low-cost differentiator grounded in the same evidence base.

Diffenthal et al. 2026 — PubMed Bleckly 2024 — PubMed 27-yr avg peer-support finding Cochlear / MED-EL / AB platforms — no equivalent found

Honest caveat — and the ask for Thursday

The value of experience duration as a mentor signal is evidence-backed from general mentorship research. The specific badge treatment on Hearpeers users is a principled extrapolation — not yet measured on this population. The mental-model research proposed (asking users what they'd call someone who guided them through the CI journey) is the right empirical input to confirm both the badge and any future rename of "Mentor." That research is Phase 2.

The ask: validate the concept with Anna and Julia here, before Ana Valesi builds the final Figma spec. We are not asking MED-EL to design it — we are showing a decided direction and inviting a reaction.

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Dependency to flag: onboarding device capture

The badge is drawn from FR3.4a data — the device profile fields already in the system. However, the onboarding device screen is currently skippable, meaning many Mentors may have no implant type or year stored. If onboarding data capture isn't fixed (briefed to Lucas, June 17), the badge will be empty for most users at launch. This should be named Thursday as a prerequisite.

Depends on: onboarding device-screen gate (Lucas brief 2026-06-17)