Device abandonment and orphaned implants
The problem of what happens to an implanted neural device when its maker stops supporting it — through bankruptcy, acquisition, pivot, or product discontinuation. Patients can be left with hardware inside their bodies that can no longer be updated, repaired, or safely explanted, and with no party responsible for its upkeep.
The paradigm case is the Argus II retinal implant: after Second Sight wound down the product line, recipients were left with obsolete, unsupported devices, some facing failures with no path to repair. The episode crystallized post-trial and post-market obligations as a first-order governance problem for any long-lived implant, BCIs included.
This exposes a gap between medical-device regulation, focused on approval and marketing, and the reality of a chronic implant's whole lifespan. Proposed remedies include long-term support guarantees, data and design escrow, explantation planning, and treating post-market care as a condition of approval — none of which is yet standard practice.