A paralyzed man who relied on a $100,000 exoskeleton lost his mobility when the manufacturer deemed the device too old to repair after only 10 years. Despite the issue being a minor battery malfunction, the company initially refused service due to its outdated model, only doing the right thing after the situation became highly publicized. Discusses the importance of right to repair laws.
SSinterwebs on
“Profit margin’s gone, here’s your coffin.” …. “Coffin was too pricey, take this shovel instead. ”
Vanillas_Guy on
This is what scares me about private companies getting involved in this kind of stuff.
It’s the same thing with ocular implants that give some vision back to visually impaired people. If the company dies because it’s stock tanks, then that’s it for your vision. Or to keep the company a float they may try to gain ad revenue by programming your implant to show you commercials or upload the data of everything it sees to a cloud platform and that data is sold to brokers.
Juls7243 on
Yey late stage capitalism. Wanna develop a new technology that actually helps people – fantastic! What we can’t be profitable in doing so – immediately stop and screw everyone. At some point things shouldn’t be only about $.
EG_Cale on
It isn’t working because they won’t fix it, I initially thought it was because of a neural control component. Perhaps I was the only one that thought the exoskeleton was rendered unusable by disbelief in it being obsolete. (from the title)
> 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
WillingnessPrize7062 on
Sorry you cripple, cough up for the latest and greatest which I will guess is 5x the original price. Greed. I hopes it bites them back one day.
Cymdai on
Planned obsolescence meets biotech; a truly dystopian future.
canal_boys on
Let me guess, the company wants him to pay a subscription for it to work
not_into_that on
corporate irresponsibility creep. next difficultly level? abandoned oil wells.
mars_titties on
I’m sure Corey Doctorow will blog about this. He’s been all over these stories of companies bricking our medical devises and vital equipment.
Moos_Mumsy on
If the repair is so simple, shouldn’t any self-respecting robotics engineer be able to fix that?
hyborians on
They can fix it but I guess the bad press was worth saving them the cost. Companies know people have a low attention span and will forget about it after a week
-Dixieflatline on
This is the dystopian reality of owning any technology these days. You may physically have it in your possession, but you don’t really own the continued operation of the object without the say so from the mega corp. But this is the craziest version because it isn’t a service or a game. This is WALKING.
johnn48 on
This is not as life changing as a medical prosthetic, but it felt that way for me. I had a stroke that basically incapacitated me and left my primary activity as reading on my iTouch. I was using a shareware app to catalog and archive all my stories and books. As Apple is wont to do they upgraded their iOS a number of times until the app developer decided they were done. So my app no longer worked on my iTouch and all my library was gone. After a time I settled on Kindle and have developed a sizable library but still worry that Amazon will decide they’re no longer interested in maintaining the Kindle platform and I’ll be out of luck again. Although there are other library readers out there, it’s hard to find one that meets your expectations for ease of use, features, and graphical user interface.
KovolKenai on
Oh wow it’s the exact thing people worried about when it came to planned obsolescence in cybernetics! Not that this guy had any other options in the matter, but yeah wow the future is already here.
Wanderlust692 on
Wow who could have predicted that the “subscribe monthly for everything to enjoy constant updates at increasing costs” culture in the tech industry would lead to this kind of situation…
YoungZM on
Somewhere corporate is having a right wank over a subscription model to a human being’s ability to have a meaningful quality of life as it relates to their health. Can’t pay their monthly fee they just doubled? Shame if you couldn’t… walk ever again.
XBB32 on
What happens when machines replace human organs and companies threaten to withhold maintenance? Laws should protect us from such actions.
bananazee on
Right to repair laws are soooooo important! I really wish people were cognizant of it
theschoolorg on
to be fair, 10 years is ancient for advanced tech. The further you throw into the future, the faster you’re going to realize how much better you could have made it.
samuel-2024 on
Certainly there is someone who can fix it. It’s annoying they won’t fix it, but doesn’t sound unfixable.
off-and-on on
This is what cyberpunk (the genre) has been saying for years. Companies can and will force you to pay up for new life-saving tech, because what’s the alternative? “Oh you can’t afford the subscription to keep your pacemaker going? Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay it. We’ll just shut it down remotely, no surgery necessary.”
RepublicansEqualScum on
Hit me up, I’ll fix it for you.
I would love to reverse-engineer a bunch of this thing and just openly publish these “secrets” the company wants to charge twice for.
Hell, if it’s just a battery or power cable or something as it seems it should be 3D printable or easy to make even better. That company absolutely doesn’t care about helping people, fuck them.
SloanWarrior on
This is why don’t like billionaires like Musk getting involved in medical tech like neural implants.
The tech is amazing, but billionaires make money by exploiting people. It becomes a matter of “how much can they charge” rather than simply charging a fair price. If technology is required for a livelyhood, the person (and their family) can be charged whatever the tech owner wants. It becomes akin to slavery.
25 Comments
A paralyzed man who relied on a $100,000 exoskeleton lost his mobility when the manufacturer deemed the device too old to repair after only 10 years. Despite the issue being a minor battery malfunction, the company initially refused service due to its outdated model, only doing the right thing after the situation became highly publicized. Discusses the importance of right to repair laws.
“Profit margin’s gone, here’s your coffin.” …. “Coffin was too pricey, take this shovel instead. ”
This is what scares me about private companies getting involved in this kind of stuff.
It’s the same thing with ocular implants that give some vision back to visually impaired people. If the company dies because it’s stock tanks, then that’s it for your vision. Or to keep the company a float they may try to gain ad revenue by programming your implant to show you commercials or upload the data of everything it sees to a cloud platform and that data is sold to brokers.
Yey late stage capitalism. Wanna develop a new technology that actually helps people – fantastic! What we can’t be profitable in doing so – immediately stop and screw everyone. At some point things shouldn’t be only about $.
It isn’t working because they won’t fix it, I initially thought it was because of a neural control component. Perhaps I was the only one that thought the exoskeleton was rendered unusable by disbelief in it being obsolete. (from the title)
> 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
Sorry you cripple, cough up for the latest and greatest which I will guess is 5x the original price. Greed. I hopes it bites them back one day.
Planned obsolescence meets biotech; a truly dystopian future.
Let me guess, the company wants him to pay a subscription for it to work
corporate irresponsibility creep. next difficultly level? abandoned oil wells.
I’m sure Corey Doctorow will blog about this. He’s been all over these stories of companies bricking our medical devises and vital equipment.
If the repair is so simple, shouldn’t any self-respecting robotics engineer be able to fix that?
They can fix it but I guess the bad press was worth saving them the cost. Companies know people have a low attention span and will forget about it after a week
This is the dystopian reality of owning any technology these days. You may physically have it in your possession, but you don’t really own the continued operation of the object without the say so from the mega corp. But this is the craziest version because it isn’t a service or a game. This is WALKING.
This is not as life changing as a medical prosthetic, but it felt that way for me. I had a stroke that basically incapacitated me and left my primary activity as reading on my iTouch. I was using a shareware app to catalog and archive all my stories and books. As Apple is wont to do they upgraded their iOS a number of times until the app developer decided they were done. So my app no longer worked on my iTouch and all my library was gone. After a time I settled on Kindle and have developed a sizable library but still worry that Amazon will decide they’re no longer interested in maintaining the Kindle platform and I’ll be out of luck again. Although there are other library readers out there, it’s hard to find one that meets your expectations for ease of use, features, and graphical user interface.
Oh wow it’s the exact thing people worried about when it came to planned obsolescence in cybernetics! Not that this guy had any other options in the matter, but yeah wow the future is already here.
Wow who could have predicted that the “subscribe monthly for everything to enjoy constant updates at increasing costs” culture in the tech industry would lead to this kind of situation…
Somewhere corporate is having a right wank over a subscription model to a human being’s ability to have a meaningful quality of life as it relates to their health. Can’t pay their monthly fee they just doubled? Shame if you couldn’t… walk ever again.
What happens when machines replace human organs and companies threaten to withhold maintenance? Laws should protect us from such actions.
Right to repair laws are soooooo important! I really wish people were cognizant of it
to be fair, 10 years is ancient for advanced tech. The further you throw into the future, the faster you’re going to realize how much better you could have made it.
Certainly there is someone who can fix it. It’s annoying they won’t fix it, but doesn’t sound unfixable.
This is what cyberpunk (the genre) has been saying for years. Companies can and will force you to pay up for new life-saving tech, because what’s the alternative? “Oh you can’t afford the subscription to keep your pacemaker going? Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay it. We’ll just shut it down remotely, no surgery necessary.”
Hit me up, I’ll fix it for you.
I would love to reverse-engineer a bunch of this thing and just openly publish these “secrets” the company wants to charge twice for.
Hell, if it’s just a battery or power cable or something as it seems it should be 3D printable or easy to make even better. That company absolutely doesn’t care about helping people, fuck them.
This is why don’t like billionaires like Musk getting involved in medical tech like neural implants.
The tech is amazing, but billionaires make money by exploiting people. It becomes a matter of “how much can they charge” rather than simply charging a fair price. If technology is required for a livelyhood, the person (and their family) can be charged whatever the tech owner wants. It becomes akin to slavery.
At the end of the article:
>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](https://paulickreport.com/news/people/paralyzed-jockey-michael-straight-wants-to-keep-walking-but-manufacturer-wont-repair-exoskeleton?ref=404media.co), 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.