A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.
As the MIT Technology Review reports, an Australian woman named Rita Leggett who received an experimental seizure-tracking brain-computer interface (BCI) implant from the now-defunct company Neuravista in 2010 has become a stark example not only of the ways neurotech can help people, but also of the trauma of losing access to them when experiments end or companies go under.
So the government can force you to go into surgery to remove something from your brain now?
It’s not the government though. It looks like the company.
This was a trial and the implant likely required to communicate with their servers and without them it wasn’t able to work.
The real issue is that probably anything that’s installed in humans needs to have schematics and software made public domain when company goes out of business so someone else could maintain it to avoid these issues.
