A former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident was able to walk again thanks to a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton.
When one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working. Desperate to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs. But it turned him away, claiming his exoskeleton was too old, *404 media *reports.
“After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy,” Michael Straight posted on Facebook earlier this month. “The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money.”
I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.
Anything related to healthcare has no business being any closer to the whims of “the market” than the public roads.
It would be unheard of for a government to stop maintaining a public road because whomever was supplying some ingredient of the asphalt said that particular mix is “to old and the new mix is not compatible with the roads created using the old mix”.
They don’t want to do it anymore, fine, then provide whatever is needed for someone else to maintain it for the cost of the materials to print/email/upload to GitHub the technical documents. It should not be legal to get someone hooked on your life altering medical device then rug pull them like this.
Prosthetics that are no longer supported, should be fully open sourced.And the copyright should immediately expire.
Support your products, or let others do it.
Tbh, I didn’t even think prosthetics could be proprietary. It’s kinda ghoulish to make it so they can be “outdated” when needing minor stuff repaired.
I work as a biomed, our hospital had to buy completely new sets of a type of ultrasound machine we have. Why?
Because in order to do the yearly preventative maintenance you have to go through the manufacturers program to test calibration. They stopped supporting it this year and shut it down. Legit these machines were working just fine, but now in order to keep up with verifying accuracy they’re essentially bricked. They did it on the exact day they hit the year mark that they legally were required to support in order to sell medical grade equipment passed.
This is only going to get worse, not better.
Strange that politics who call for deregulation never deregulate useful things.
But just out of interest, what happened to the devices?
Absolutely 100% this. Or at the very least, have all schematics and software source code and other such things placed in escrow so if the company refuses to support them there is some kind of option. This goes double for anything implanted.
The IP and copyright laws is century old and in dire need to get reformed. Nintendo being able to takedown a video just because it show the title screen of one of their game for literally a split second is ridiculous. Or a studio able to take all of the revenue from someone’s video because they hummed a tune for a few seconds.
[Insert Steel Ball Run Reference Here Because Someone Mentioned A Paralyzed Jockey]
Anyway…
Human Greed is what’s obsolete and it is beyond past time to end support for it.
Ghost in the Shell called it thirty years ago.
cant a battery be rigged to fit? no modders around?
I work in appliance repair. My favorite appliance to fix are sub zero refrigerators. They’re easy to work on, straight forward and the company continues to support their product as far back as models from the 1970s.
Subzero makes nothing more than household appliances a thankless industry plagued by planner obsolescence and they can supply parts for their appliances longer than a medical company.
So I looked them up, and the cheapest home-style refrigerator they sell costs $10,000. Am I missing something or are they really just that expensive?
Sure but they use a 5$ door hinge instead of a 3$ one and that makes all the difference
Well, for one, they support 60 year old devices.
Yeah, but your fridge doesn’t break every six years. I’m totally on team repair (FrameWork will be my next laptop when this one can’t go on any further, my shoes can be resoled, I just touched up my jacket, etc) but a 10x premium doesn’t exactly make sense, even when you factor in that repairability is unfortunately a niche feature these days.
Got any recommendations in the 5k range?
Imagine if Intel snapped and disabled Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair and computer, and he needed to pay for a new one with a different voice, absolutely helpless without it.
This is something I wish cyberpunk media touched more on.
One thing I always thought about when playing cyberpunk 2077 is why wouldn’t companies have a failsafe for their equipment being used against them. In the game, you can use cyber decks from Arisaka and Militech and be able to hack and assault their infrastructure and employees with impunity.
I am not really sure companies would allow that…
That’s the problem with cyberpunk as a genre. Its to cool. The first Deus Ex did it right. If it was in the hands of a better developer Watch Dogs could have too.
Overlooking the concept of a failsafe? How did they get past the concept of the subscription model?
I always imagined that it was due to a higher level of computer literacy amongst the consumer population. An hour after a corpo releases a new piece of tech under a subscription model, the software has been cracked and pirated all over the net.
Fuck me I didn’t think about that… owning your own implants? Goddamn!
Presumably those failsafes can be circumvented and your character being a cool hacker applies those exploits to their hardware.
“Jailbroken”
Uh yes the cracked version of Ida pro getting used to crack the next version of Ida pro.
This ends with Microsoft pluton
Kinda like how software crackers have a pirated version of a game ready to go within hours, regardless of the encryption.
I guess that does make sense.
deleted by creator
why wouldn’t companies have a failsafe for their equipment being used against them
Because they got tired of paying for the whiny engineers that would have to implement the failsafe and so they fired them all.
so they fired them all
Even fictional evil companies need to meet goals set by the board.
Fortunately, Lifeward eventually capitulated and Straight was able to get his exoskeleton repaired — but that was only after an intense campaign in which he went on local TV, got highlighted in a horse industry publication, and gained steam on social media. If it weren’t for that, he could still be struggling to find a way to get his mobility back again.
Uhg, needed bad PR before they changed their mind
Yeah, gaining public attention is definitely what saved him here. Who would ever spend $100k on an exoskeleton if the company is only going to support it for 5 years, and won’t even help with a minor repair?
got highlighted in a horse industry publication
Wait what?
Edit: duh, he was a jockey. I should let the moment of confusion settle before replying.
Sorry
Horses are relentless.
Hole horse? This a Jojo reference?
Its a variation on this
This is why nobody should ever put any tech in their brain. Among 50 billion other reasons.
Oh that already happened too. A bunch of blind people got implants and the company abandoned them.
The first thing that came to mind.
This is turning into a pattern now, fuck, I wish the lawmakers would fucking do something about it!Context for other readers: ‘Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported’ by Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris.
It’s a disgrace.That is a horrific outcome.
Free-licence the Argus IP now.
Any private, medical IP that gets abandoned should be eminent domained. If your company is going under or you don’t want to maintain it, either sell the ip to company that will maintain it or open it up.
That came to mind, too. If this shit isn’t open source it is not worth spit.
Even for a corporation that is fucked up.
We need to stop buying into this whole beneficial corporation idea.
Fucking exactly!
Poor guy, I guess legally he hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
Thnx, that was some dark humor that really hit the spot for me.
The future is stupid, we were promised jetpacks, not planned obsolescence mobility devices.
Oh, we already have jetpacks. They’re just not affordable for the average person and are insanely dangerous to fly with. Also, afaik, they only get less than an hour of flight time.
371k steps over 10 years is like 100 steps per day. Is it really slow, or did he only use it once a week?
My guess is he would use a wheelchair at home where the area is prepared to accommodate it. The exoskeleton is likely slower and harder to wear around the house, but can make him mobile in places where a wheelchair can’t go.
Hope he can make it to at least a million steps to bring down his per step cost below 10 cents.
