“I remember exactly where I was: I went from train 6 to train F“, remembers Barbara Campbell. “I was about to go down the stairs, and suddenly I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’“, she tells IEEE Spectrum. This noise was coming from his Argus II Retinal Implant System, which was shutting down.
Manufactured by Second Sight Medical Products, the Argus I and Argus II implants have enabled more than 350 blind people to transform their lives by allowing them to recover artificial vision. If the technology does not allow to find a completely normal sight, the patients equipped with the implants manage to see the world which surrounds them in shade of gray, with more or less success according to the patients.
But in 2020, the company’s finances are bad: on the verge of bankruptcy, Second Sight decides to abandon the technology. Without notifying its customers.
For Terry Byland, the only patient to have had both eyes operated on, the news came as a bombshell. He was indeed very invested alongside the company for ten years, not hesitating to speak about his experience to the press on several occasions. Terry Byland even appears in a video posted on the Second Sight Youtube channel (see below).
His implant system still works, but for how long? “As long as there is no problem, everything is fine. But if something goes wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. ‘Cause there’s no way to get it fixed“, he laments.
It is a “fantastic technology” but a “crappy company”, summarizes another patient. After hearing rumors at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he called his vision rehabilitation therapist Second Sight. She announces to him that she has just been made redundant and that he could not benefit from the next upgrades.
Missing updates
Patients fitted with the implants had been informed that updates would take place in the future. For example, the company was talking about software updates to increase the number of pixels in the system and thermal imaging, reports IEEE Spectrum. But these never arrived.
In 2019, the company announced that it was phasing out the technology. In 2020, the CEO left the company and most employees were laid off, leaving patients to fend for themselves. According to Second Sight, the layoffs in effect mean that it is impossible to “continue the previous level of support and communication for Argus II centers and users”.
Now, Second Sight is considering a merger with a bio-pharmaceutical company. Argus patients, on the other hand, fear being stuck with an obsolete implant that has become totally useless.