The things you buy aren’t actually the things you buy. And the things you own aren’t actually the things you own. Things you thought you owned can be downgraded or killed off entirely.
That game console with backward compatibility? It no longer has backward compatibility. That smart home hub you’ve enjoyed for years? It no longer works. That perfectly good two-year-old phone? It no longer gets security updates.
This is all bad enough when talking about smart home hubs or smart refrigerators, but it’s another thing entirely when it comes to life-saving or pain-reducing medical implants. Like in 2020, when a company named Argus shut down, leaving customers losing the gift of sight thanks to their medical implants no longer being supported.
Nature Magazine took a deeper look at the problem of medical implant customers suddenly being left high and dry by either incompetence, policy changes, or bankruptcies. The article highlights collapses by companies that make spinal-cord stimulators, vision implants, chronic pain management systems, and other medical implant technologies that make life bearable for millions. Sometimes users had expensive alternatives they could flee too, often they did not. Even when they did, it required new surgeries.
Few of them designed systems that could withstand company collapse, and like most modern tech companies few, if any, supported independent consumer or third-party repair. This greatly restricts not only who these patients can turn to for help, but the availability of parts and documentation. And, even if they can find parts, they’ll often run into trouble with their insurers. Or with companies that quickly acquire the patents shortly after a medical implant company implodes, then do nothing with them.
There are some things that can be done to help. Passing right to repair laws would be a good start, but so far these laws are few and far between and often don’t include medical hardware. Advocates have also pushed for various reform changes and the creation of nonprofits to try and prevent these problems:
“Suggestions include the company setting up a partner non-profit organisation to manage funds to cover this eventuality; putting aside money in an escrow account; being obliged to take out an insurance policy that would support users; paying into a government-supported safety network; or ensuring the people using the devices are high-priority creditors in bankruptcy proceedings.”
But there’s very little indication any of that’s happening on any real scale. Fixing this could potentially require a law that protects these users, but that isn’t likely to happen until there’s a scandal that’s so ugly, denying the problem is no longer possible. And even then, patients will likely be waiting a long while.
By Karl Bode writing for Techdirt.