Continuity · Oakland, California
“They told me to upgrade. People used to say that about my car”
Denise has seen through a SEIRAN 2 implant since 2011. In 2025 its battery began to fail, six years after the company stopped selling the device and a year after it stopped supporting it.
Denise was a dispatcher for a bus company in Oakland for twenty-six years. In 2010 a car ran a red light and hit the driver’s side of hers. She lost her left eye. A year later, at fifty-one, she was fitted with a SEIRAN 2, an ocular implant made by Kiroshi Opticals, which replaced the eye and connected to her optic nerve.
“It took about six months before the world stopped looking like it was on television,” she says. “After that I forgot about it, mostly. I drove. I went back to work. It was my eye.”
Five more years
In 2019 Kiroshi Opticals stopped selling the SEIRAN 2, and wrote to its wearers to say that the device would be supported, with parts and software updates, until 2024. The letter offered a discount on a replacement. Replacement means surgery to remove the old device and fit a new one, and Denise had had complications the first time, an infection that kept her in hospital for three weeks. She decided to keep the eye she had.
Support ended in March 2024. In the summer of 2025 Denise began to notice that her left eye went dim in the late afternoon, then that it switched itself off. “Once on the freeway,” she says. “I pulled over and sat there with one eye for twenty minutes until it came back.” The battery, sealed inside the device and recharged through the skin each night, was failing.
She called the company’s helpline, which told her that the SEIRAN 2 was no longer supported and suggested a replacement.
They told me to upgrade. People used to say that about my car.
The drawer
Her optometrist gave her the number of the Bay Area Implant Aftercare Collective, a repair clinic in Oakland funded by the Foundation’s Continuity programme. The clinic keeps a library of spare parts for discontinued implants: parts bought from the makers’ last stock, parts recovered from devices removed from people who died or had them replaced, with consent, and parts made new from documentation that Continuity paid engineers to write.
Replacing a SEIRAN 2 battery is a short operation under local anaesthetic, through the same small opening used for charging. The clinic’s surgeon did it in November, with a battery from a drawer labelled S2-BAT. The device has worked through every afternoon since.
The battery came from Kiroshi Opticals, which still makes a small number for the Foundation, and nobody else. The Foundation paid for it, and for the surgery. Denise paid nothing. “I asked who to thank,” she says, “and they gave me a list.”
What comes next
A battery should last about seven years. In seven years Denise will be seventy-two, and the SEIRAN 2 will be twenty-two years old. Continuity has placed the device’s firmware in escrow with an independent archive, so that engineers can fix software faults after the last people who wrote it have retired. It cannot promise there will always be batteries.
Denise keeps the old battery in a small box on her kitchen windowsill. She has asked the clinic to put her on the list for the new connector when it is made.