The bionic eyes of more than 350 people stop working due to lack of support

Electronic implants without updates or support services also become obsolete, as has happened with the more than 350 people in the world who wear Second Sight bionic eyes after the bankruptcy of this technology company.

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Second Sight Medical Products has specialized in its more than 20 years of experience in technology to treat visual impairment and blindness. The retinal implant is its most outstanding advance, and it has come to have two models: Argus I with a matrix of 16 electrodes and Argus II, with 60.

In 2020 the company went bankrupt, abandoning the technology that it had developed and implanted in more than 350 people around the world, giving them a new opportunity to see around them, as collected by IEEE Spectrum.

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Still, last year it managed to raise $57.5 million in a public offering, and this month it announced its merger with biopharmaceutical company Nano Precision Medical.

Second Sight reported that it would work on a new generation of implants, Orion, which is implanted directly in the brain, something that is also listed on its website. But there are no known plans to recover the Argus implants, which is already having an effect on the people who wear them.

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One of them, a woman who wears an Argus II bionic eye in her left eye, says that it suddenly turned off while making a transfer on public transport in New York (United States) and has not worked since.

Another man, who received an implant in 2019, was waiting for a software update that would improve his vision by 2020, when they started laying off workers at the company, who assured him that he would no longer have it.

A second man, who became the first person in the world to have both bionic eyes (Argus I in the right eye in 2004 and Argus II in the left, in 2015), even gave lectures on Second Sight technology.

These and the rest of the people who managed to recover some vision with the implants currently lack a service that improves the bionic eye that they wear or that solves the problems that may arise in its wear and tear.

But they are not the only risks they face, since implants can cause medical complications or hinder tests such as MRIs, and their removal is not always an option, because it can be complicated and expensive, and even painful. .

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Source: Elcomercio

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