Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete
Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete
Michael Straight said Lifeward refused to repair his $100,000 exoskeleton, which only had a minor issue with its battery.
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."
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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.