A Boring Dystopia

9776 readers

185 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

givesomefucks@lemmy.world

521

Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will (futurism.com)

submitted 3 months ago by MattW03@lemmy.ca to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

82 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 months ago

One relevant detail is that this was not a self contained device, it was for monitoring likelihood of seizures and had an external wireless interface. So my guess (this is pure speculation) on what happened is, the company owned the monitoring device, and the signals from the in-brain device were proprietary and encrypted. They couldn't force her to have surgery but they could take back the external interface which was their property, and without that the in-brain device did nothing. Then the patient agreed to surgery because there was no further benefit to keeping it in her head and probably greater health risks to doing so.