https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
"Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during
rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been
using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic
vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her
completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching
from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to
go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’
sound.”
It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant
system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see
with the implant’s help vanished.
Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both
eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second
Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II
implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology,
spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder
at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing
to being a spokesman,” he remembers.
Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned
the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant
system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As
long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong
with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”"
Via John Wehrle.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
