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.
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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.
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.
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
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
Got any recommendations in the 5k range?
This is a very good question.
I’m assuming you mean a range around $5000?
In that case there’s really not much in that specific price range.
Ranges in general can cost between 500 and 3000 dollars for a regular range you can get at your local appliance retailer. Here in the states that would be like home Depot or Lowe’s.
If you wanted more high end than that you’d have to go much higher up in price. Like past $10000. It’s a weird market for ranges.
I recommend Frigidaire for cooking appliances in general they make really good ranges. For less than $1000 dollars you can get a very decent appliance.
Ghost in the Shell called it thirty years ago.
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.
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.
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.
This very much sucks.
Edit: message received. Sorry.
I don’t think anyone should expect a battery replacement to be free after 10 years, but it shouldn’t cost $100,000
Right? It’s a frigging battery.
Surely we can get a group of battery techs and mechanical engineers together to come up with a solution.
Hell, I’ve been bastardizing the “wrong” batteries into devices since the mid-70’s, while today I’m usually replacing crappy built-in batteries with 18650’s. And I’m no EE, just have a little skill and vision.
Surely the battery spec on this is pretty clear, and it’s an off-the-shelf tech (not some odd chemistry devised by the company). Not that it really matters - a replacement merely needs to fit in the space, and match voltage and current requirements.
Here’s my guess. I don’t know anything about this particular device, but I have worked with medical devices.
A powered exo-skeleton sounds like it might be a class II medical device. Being a medical device, the OEM was required to produce a safety risk analysis per ISO 14971 in the EU and 21 CFR 820 in the US. I don’t know what all was listed, but probably one of the safety risks was thermal runaway from the (assumed) lithium ion batteries.
Lithium ion battery packs have a well known problem with occasionally overheating and catching fire. This famously delayed the launch of the 787 Dreamliner. This is also why you can’t put your phone or laptop battery into your checked luggage.
In the original risk analysis, there will be a number of mitigation steps identified for each hazard. For the lithium thermal runway, these probably include a mix of temperature monitoring, overheat shutdown, and passive design features in the battery pack itself to try to keep the impacts of over temperature and fire away from the patient.
So how does the price get to 100k? It could be some kind of unique design features that are now out of production and the original tooling is not available. The 100k cost is probably something like to redesign the production tooling, particularly if you have to remake injection molds.
You can’t just use any off the shelf battery pack, because that would invalidate the risk analysis. You’d need to redo the risk analysis, repeat at least some amount of validation testing, and possibly resubmit an application to the FDA.
TLDR: you can get some MEs and EEs together to solve this problem, but once they’re on the case, you can blow through 100k real fast.
Rebuilding the original pack with new cells is semi-common practice, no need for new tooling
Oh
According to Straight, the issue was caused by a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch used to control the exoskeleton. This would cost peanuts for Lifeward to fix up, but it refused to service anything more than five years old, Straight said
Yeah, that’s something any jackass with a soldering iron could fix in about 10 seconds
Wow.
Again, the kind of fix I’ve done thousands of times on all sorts of devices.
Oh, yea, I get the safety angle, but that work has already been done.
If I’m replacing a battery in something like thsas long as I use the same tech, where’s the concern?
If the factory battery has built-in BMS, then I should use the same, that’s about the only concern I’d have. And if it’s NiMH, well, even less of a concern.
And for this use-case, I wouldn’t be cheap on my replacements, like I am for stuff that’s low risk (like a flashlight that lives in a metal cabinet outside - if that lithium does a runaway, there’s little risk).
he’s not asking for a warranty claim or replacement, he’s asking for a repair service. it’s like taking your 10 year old accord to the service center to get some bushings/mounts/battery or whatever replaced
To get your…battery replaced, and they want to charge you for a new engine.
More like they want to charge you for a new car
Respectfully requesting that in the future, you read articles before replying.
And:
According to Straight, the issue was caused by a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch used to control the exoskeleton. This would cost peanuts for Lifeward to fix up, but it refused to service anything more than five years old, Straight said.
“I find it very hard to believe after paying nearly $100,000 for the machine and training that a $20 battery for the watch is the reason I can’t walk anymore?” he wrote on Facebook.
This is all over a battery in a watch.
lol lol
You: he was about to move around for a few years and should be happy with that and accept his paralyzed state
dude’s paid $10k a year just to do what we can do for free. I don’t think that’s “pretty good”. if I pay $100k on anything it better work for life
It’s an exoskeleton, not a consumer electronic, what a disgusting thing to say
Yours is one of the most well deserved downvotes. Dude got paralyzed, literally cannot walk or stand anymore, received the exoskeleton (which was paid for in full by a fundraiser back in 2015) and the company simply decided “nah, we don’t touch anything older than 5 years”, knowing full well that this is NOT a disposable device and that Michael would need it for the rest of his life.
Keep in mind Lifewalk, the company behind the exoskeleton, didn’t even try to come up with a public bullshit reason to deny maintenance to a device that they knew full well would be used for the rest of the person’s life, or upsell a newer model.
I mean it’s a $100,000 medical device, basically. Imagine if they just abandoned any other medical equipment like that? Sorry, your pacemaker isn’t supported anymore.
That’s true for consumer electronics. However, more expensive things like cars are usually kept running for much longer.
Cars are probably covered differently by law, like minimum years producer has to offer replacement parts and such. Probably all boils down to the contract for that exoskeleton. Definitely not an excuse for that petty company trying to suck tens of thousands of dollars instead of a simple repair.
