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
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?
The future is stupid, we were promised jetpacks, not planned obsolescence mobility devices.
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.
