A jockey who is paralyzed from the waist down lost his ability to walk after a small battery for his $100,000 exoskeleton broke and the manufacturer refused to fix it because it was more than 5 years old
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This is the dystopia we live in. Companies stop servicing products or go out of business and people lose the ability to walk. Right to repair laws fix this. After widespread outrage and reporting by media in the horse industry, he was able to get it fixed after two months. Medical device manufacturers have been among the worst in lobbying against right to repair laws, and have used fearmongering to do so
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@jasonkoebler Jesus, this is goddamn dark.
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@ernie @jasonkoebler this is an aspect of our cyberpunk future j had hoped would only be fictional (cyborgs with broken systems they can’t afford to keep up to date).
But it is also seriously why I’ve never thought the vision of implanted augmentations made sense and feared for people who don’t have a choice - as the article notes people lost their restored sight when one company went bankrupt. Imagine that happening to implanted pacemakers or other lifesaving devices. It’s dystopian.
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So, it's not a good idea to trust anything from Lifeward, which makes the ReWalk exoskeleton?
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@Walrus @ernie @jasonkoebler it’s more “don’t trust any manufacturer of devices that don’t make it possible to maintain them into the future” which is challenging as that’s most companies these days. Hence the push for a formal right of repair. It’s particularly jarring in this case as a $100k device failing because of a $20 or less part feels egregious but it is far from a unique to that company problem (as the article notes with ventilators during the initial days of the pandemic)
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DDRitter 🏳️🌈🎗️🇵🇸replied to Shannon Clark last edited by
@Rycaut Repo Men (2010)
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Shannon Clarkreplied to DDRitter 🏳️🌈🎗️🇵🇸 last edited by
@ddritter indeed. Though I have more memories of the 1984 unrelated film Repo Man. (Apparently the 2010 film’s name is a bit of a snub on the director of the 1984 film as he had released a semi-sequel direct to video a year earlier.) reviews seem fairly negative but indeed the core idea is perhaps where we are kinda headed alas.
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@Rycaut @ernie @jasonkoebler in the context of for-profit healthcare systems, it also holds the promise of untold fortunes -- holding people hostage (or private health insurance companies holding them hostage) until payments are made to restore their health. If you can't afford the latest greatest update, or your insurer chooses to not cover it, tough luck.
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@RebelGeek99 @Rycaut @ernie @jasonkoebler "Give us money or we will kill you". Straight-up Mafia stuff.
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@mike @RebelGeek99 @ernie @jasonkoebler while awful that model would at least mean there was a way to get such devices working again. But the current reality is if anything worse - companies refusing to support older devices (in some cases only 5 years old) so not even taking money just abandoning the buyers of the products entirely.
(At times this is also because the company has gone out of business and/or stopped making the product entirely) indifferent to the real impact
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@Rycaut @mike @ernie @jasonkoebler true. It's more a "left for dead" than a "held hostage" business model, in the worst cases.