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.”
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
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
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?
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.
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!
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.
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?
Strange that politics who call for deregulation never deregulate useful things.
Funny that right? Those that call for deregulation would probably call for deregulating the legal time frame that a company has to support their devices.
And as to what we did with ours, effectively trash. We have a medical junk guy who comes through yearly and picks up the stuff thats getting thrown out, he parts pieces out he can sell, sells scrap otherwise, etc. Also sells a lot of equipment to smaller hospitals out in rural that will make do, and a lot of stuff we have goes to Project Cure which sends medical devices out of country to places in need. The funny part about the rural hospitals and Project Cure is… neither of those can happen because, as I said earlier, can’t verify their accuracy anymore so for my hospital, about 30 units of trash in one day.
Shit man… you should get in contact with a maker space or hacker space. Maybe a bounty on Hackaday which just jailbreaks those devices. At least they stay useable (I would love to tinker around with one of these, and so would probably a lot of makers).
Thanks for the answer. Really a sad world we live in.
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.
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.
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.
He shouldn’t stand for this!
He can’t. He’s paralyzed and his exoskeleton is broken.
On a more serious note, the 404media article (login wall) reports the problem was that the wristwatch controller for the exoskeleton had its battery wire’s solder joint break. They seem to be trying to frame it as a right to repair issue, but that’s a trivial repair for anyone with basic electronics experience.
It’s a trivial repair assuming that’s the extent of the damage and there’s not any quirks associated with an extremely complex medical device that has no documentation whatsoever. Like maybe after not having the controller’s power supply connected for such a length of time there needs to be a calibration process upon bringing it back to life that can only be done with proprietary software
The biggest thing though is that by going in and fixing it yourself you open yourself to the possibility that the company will now say “oh this was worked on by someone else and that’s why it’s broken, we won’t work on it now”. That’s the state of repair rights in America, vendors are openly hostile to people who fix their own things even if they do it sufficiently. We used to have political representation that gave us regulations to allow us to work on and even modify our cars without impacting the warranty but that’s been eroded and there’s not really anything of that nature for tech stuff (other than judgements saying broken warranty seals don’t count for anything)
here’s not really anything of that nature for tech stuff
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act does not exclude tech stuff. The problem is that it’s a lot harder to work on tech stuff without insider information than 1970s cars.
Best to use the archived links bypasses the login barrier, as well as paywalls.
Guilty upvote for you
Ghost in the Shell called it thirty years ago.
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…
Overlooking the concept of a failsafe? How did they get past the concept of the subscription model?
Fuck me I didn’t think about that… owning your own implants? Goddamn!
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.
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.
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.
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 $10,000. Am I missing something or are they really just that expensive?
Well, for one, they support 60 year old devices.
Yeah, but your fridge doesn’t break every six years. I’m totally on team repair (FrameWork will be my next laptop when this one can’t go on any further, my shoes can be resoled, I just touched up my jacket, etc) but a 10x premium doesn’t exactly make sense, even when you factor in that repairability is unfortunately a niche feature these days.
Sure but they use a 5$ door hinge instead of a 3$ one and that makes all the difference
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.
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.
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.
[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.
cant a battery be rigged to fit? no modders around?
