MADRID, 16 Feb. (Portaltric/EP) –
The electronic implants no updates or support services are also 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.
Second Sight Medical Products has specialized in its more than 20 years of experience in technology that allows 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 bankruptabandoning the technology that had been developed and implanted in more than 350 people around the world, giving them a new opportunity to see around them, as collected IEEE Spectrum.
Still, last year it managed to raise $57.5 million in a public offering, and this month it announced its merger with the 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 collected in his web page. But there are no known plans to recover the Argus implants, which is already having an effect on the people who wear them.
One of them, a woman who wears an Argus II bionic eye in her left eye, tells that this suddenly turned off while making a transfer on public transport in New York (United States) and it hasn’t worked again since then.
Another man, who received an implant in 2019, was waiting for a ‘software’ update that it would improve his vision for 2020, when they began to lay off the company’s workers, who assured him that he would no longer have it.
A second man, he 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), he 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 what are they wearing or what solve any problems that may arise in wear and tear.
But they are not the only risks they face, since the implants can cause medical complications or hamper testing such as MRIs, and their removal is not always an option, because it can be complicated and expensive, and even painful.