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Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] Azal@pawb.social 43 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zementid@feddit.nl 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Strange that politics who call for deregulation never deregulate useful things.

But just out of interest, what happened to the devices?

[–] Azal@pawb.social 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zementid@feddit.nl 2 points 2 months ago

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.