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.
Clickbait title for extra sensationalism. Nobody physically forced her to have the surgery to remove the implant.
I sympathize with this woman however it was part of the trial for it to be switched off and removed at the end of the trial, which is what she agreed to, though it does raise a lot of questions about medical trials/procedures involving implants.
If the company no longer exists but let her keep the implant, what happens when something goes wrong? Who is responsible, who do medical professionals trying to help with what went wrong contact for context, who bears the cost, what happens if it’s hacked, etc etc. If it was left in and she ended up dying, it’s guaranteed that headlines will talk about it being irresponsible and medical malpractice.
Fwiw, reading the MIT review, this device didn’t prevent her seizures, but monitored brainwave activity and used an algorithm to predict the likelihood of an imminent seizure. She seems to have been an edge case in terms of successi in the trial.
It seems the issue is that this gave her confidence to leave the house to do things. Prior to that she very rarely left the house because of the unpredictability of her seizures. It must suck to have that confidence, and therefore freedom, taken away.
Did you read it?
She and her husband attempted to fight the demand, attempting to buy the implant outright and, as University of Tasmania ethicist and paper coauthor Frederic Gilbert told the Tech Review, remortgaging their house to do so. They were unsuccessful, and she was the last person to get the Neuravista BCI removed.
On the bright side, she no longer has Johnny Silverhand living in her head and complaining about all her decisions.
The fun thing is that half the time Johnny complains, you gain approval with him anyway. He may bitch about you stopping to save random folks and talk about how it won’t actually change anything, but he still approves deep down. He also approves if you call him on his bullshit, which is a nice change from most RPGs requiring you to be absurdly supportive of your party’s awful decisions to top off that approval meter.
She and her husband attempted to fight the demand, attempting to buy the implant outright…
It was compulsory brain surgery for a repo.
In other words the company interests superceded the patient’s
This is the sort of inciting incident that triggers cyberpunk dystopian adventures that conclude in a blaze of electrical grid collapses, warehouse explosions and mass spiritual awakening. Then the protagonist moves to Amsterdam.
It was compulsory brain surgery for a repo. … This is the sort of inciting incident that triggers cyberpunk dystopian adventures
Fingers crossed this woman doesn’t end up with a Zydrate addiction. It comes in a little glass vial, you know.
That was my first thought as well. Glad to see it posted, because it’s sort of a niche cult classic.
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.
I’m kind of in that boat. I mean not really, and it’s not life-changing like it is for the lady, but it’s the same sort of issue.
I have implants inside of me. They’re RFID and NFC transponders of various kind made by Dangerous Things. They’re not essential to my life in the sense that I could very well do without them, but they’re immensely useful and handy on a day-to-day basis.
One of them is a payment implant. The implant was made in 2020 and is not in fact allowed by Mastercard - meaning if the payment processor figures out it’s under my skin, they’ll strike it off the EMVCo network and I’ll lose the ability to make payments with my hand. It expires in 2029, and I already know after that date that there probably won’t be a replacement available. So I will lose that ability in 2029.
And you know what? It really does feel like a loss: this is my second payment implant because the first one failed a year in, and that’s what it felt like. Similarly, I have other implants that I use all the time to open doors and authenticate with online services, and when those fail (and some of them did, I had to have them replaced), it does feel like losing a bodily function too.
I’m an amputee, so I know what it feels like to lose bits of myself, and when one of my implant fails, it feels very similar. Not the same and not as terrible of course, but it’s the same kind of feeling: you feel less yourself and less able than you used to be.
The other question that arises is whether implants become part of your body, and whether anybody is legally allowed to take them away from you. In other words, nobody is legally allowed to remove your heart or your spleen without your consent, but are implants treated the same way?
Like for example, suppose I go to court and a judge reckons my cryptographic implant was used to encrypt evidence on my computer: can the judge order it removed from my body against my will to send it to a forensic lab? I mean after all, it’s now part of my body and providing me with a new bodily ability of sorts: it could be argued that removing my implant can be construed as disabling me - which, as I said, really does feel a bit like that.
This has never come up in court, and I’m an honest, nice guy so I won’t be the one breaking that particular ground. But the question is intriguing.
