Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability To Walk After Manufacturer Refuses To Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton 122
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: After a horseback riding accident left him paralyzed from the waist down in 2009, former jockey Michael Straight learned to walk again with the help of a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton. Earlier this month, that exoskeleton broke because of a malfunctioning piece of wiring in an accompanying watch that makes the exoskeleton work. The manufacturer refused to fix it, saying the machine was now too old to be serviced, and Straight once again couldn't walk anymore. "After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy," Straight posted on Facebook on September 16. "The reasons [sic] why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money. The reason it stopped is because of a battery in the watch I wear to operate the machine. I called thinking it was no big deal, yet I was told they stopped working on any machine that was 5 years or older. 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?"
Straight's experience is a nightmare scenario that highlights what happens when companies decide to stop supporting their products and do not actively support independent repair. It's also what happens without the protection of right to repair legislation that requires manufacturers to make repair parts, guides, and tools available to the general public. Specifically, a connection wire became desoldered from the battery in a watch that connects to the exoskeleton: "It's not the actual battery, but it's the little green connection piece we need to be the right fit and that's been our problem," Straight posted on Facebook. Straight's personal exoskeleton was broken for two months, he said in a video on Facebook. He was eventually able to get the device fixed after attention from an article in the Paulick Report, a website about the horse industry, and a spot on local TV. "It took me two months, and I got no results," he said in the video. With social media and news attention, "it only took you all four days, and look at the results," he said earlier this week while standing in the exoskeleton. "This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in, where the manufacturer perspective on products is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer. That's not good enough for a device like this, but it's also the same thing we see up and down with every single product," Nathan Proctor, head of citizen rights group US PIRG's right to repair project told 404 Media. "People need to be able to fix things, there needs to be a plan in place. A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts, that's enraging. We should not have to tolerate a society where this happens."
"We have all this technology we release into the wild and it changes people's lives, but there's no long-term thinking. Manufacturers currently have no legal obligation to support the equipment indefinitely and there's no requirements that they publish sufficient documentation to allow others to do it," Proctor said. "We need to set minimum standards for documentation so that, even if a company goes bankrupt or falls off the face of the earth, a technician with sufficient knowledge can fix it."
Straight's experience is a nightmare scenario that highlights what happens when companies decide to stop supporting their products and do not actively support independent repair. It's also what happens without the protection of right to repair legislation that requires manufacturers to make repair parts, guides, and tools available to the general public. Specifically, a connection wire became desoldered from the battery in a watch that connects to the exoskeleton: "It's not the actual battery, but it's the little green connection piece we need to be the right fit and that's been our problem," Straight posted on Facebook. Straight's personal exoskeleton was broken for two months, he said in a video on Facebook. He was eventually able to get the device fixed after attention from an article in the Paulick Report, a website about the horse industry, and a spot on local TV. "It took me two months, and I got no results," he said in the video. With social media and news attention, "it only took you all four days, and look at the results," he said earlier this week while standing in the exoskeleton. "This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in, where the manufacturer perspective on products is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer. That's not good enough for a device like this, but it's also the same thing we see up and down with every single product," Nathan Proctor, head of citizen rights group US PIRG's right to repair project told 404 Media. "People need to be able to fix things, there needs to be a plan in place. A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts, that's enraging. We should not have to tolerate a society where this happens."
"We have all this technology we release into the wild and it changes people's lives, but there's no long-term thinking. Manufacturers currently have no legal obligation to support the equipment indefinitely and there's no requirements that they publish sufficient documentation to allow others to do it," Proctor said. "We need to set minimum standards for documentation so that, even if a company goes bankrupt or falls off the face of the earth, a technician with sufficient knowledge can fix it."
Break out the iFixit kit (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a new spokesman for right to repair.
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I'm sure he has the right to repair, he bought the equipment and the company doesn't want it back. So go to the mall and get the watch battery replaced.
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Re:Break out the iFixit kit (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a photo of the battery in TFA.
It's a standard 3.7v 1.7Ah battery pack.
It's available on Amazon for $10.99 and on Walmart.com for $11.04.
The photo shows the red anode wire is loose, so it might not need a new battery.
A few minutes with a soldering iron might fix the problem.
Re:Break out the iFixit kit (Score:5, Funny)
The photo shows the red anode wire is loose, so it might not need a new battery.
Noooo! In movies, that's always the wire that detonates the bomb.
Re: Break out the iFixit kit (Score:2)
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It blows my mind how few people read the fucking summary.
You must be new here.
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Oh c'mon...you're ID shows your not new to slashdot...you know people don't read all the summaries....its a long running meme here, haha.
Re: Break out the iFixit kit (Score:2)
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For the right to repair, it would need to be reasonably easily accessible (e.g. like a normal watch battery), no DRM nonsense, remains fully functional (including waterproofing) after repair, and any documentation needed for the repair must be supplied.
Were all those conditions met?
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I want my watch battery replaced - fine
I want the controller battery replaced in a piece of medical equipment - hell no, think of the liability
I may actually be on the side of the manufacturer here, they carry a lot of responsibility and they should get compensated for that. Is what they are doing a shitty thing, yes, but there needs to be a way for them to at least cover the liability issues and retiring old equipment is a part of that. The manufacturer is partly hostage to the liability I think
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He isn't going to have lost it for long IMHO. He should be able to easily get funding from various entities including private citizens.
It's the way to launch a fund raising campaign; make people know and heck, the company could even be in it somehow, with or without his knowledge. The summary sounds awkward.
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Pretty Cunniving for the Company (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know the full details, but I bet the company is thinking that his insurance is going to pick up the cost of another exoskeleton and then, ka-ching! I'd bet he can find a reputable repair shop to replace the battery for free as long as they're not held liable for it to work afterward. If the company has programmed the device in a way that a battery change requires them to interact with the watch and enter codes into it, then he's probably got grounds to file suit. The bogus thing is that, during all these, he'd be unable to walk, and that's a sad thing.
Re:Pretty Cunniving for the Company (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know the full details, but I bet the company is thinking that his insurance is going to pick up the cost of another exoskeleton and then, ka-ching!
Pretty much. You have to shame medical device manufacturers before they will change their bordering-on-insurance-fraud policies.
The reality is that the FDA and/or Medicare should have required the devices to have user-replaceable parts at a coarse component level, and required that those parts be backwards compatible with previous generations for at least a couple of decades. They didn't, and of course the manufacturer would rather people throw away a $10k exoskeleton rather than replace the $100 wristband, because that makes them a higher profit margin, so the behavior of the manufacturer is entirely predictable. It all comes down to the insurers and the government not having the foresight to regulate medical devices more competently.
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In the photo in TFA, it looks like the red wire broke off the battery. Five minutes with a soldering iron and ... fixed. The battery and pigtail look like a replaceable part. Not much different from the AliExpress part I fixed my dash cam with a few months ago.
On the other hand, the battery markings look a bit odd. Polarity markings don't line up with wire colors and there are two different capacity markings on it. Some vendors order custom parts with proprietary part numbers and other markings. Just to ke
Re:Pretty Cunniving for the Company (Score:4, Informative)
Watt hours = Amp Hours x Volts
Polarity is trivial to check with a multimeter but i would be inclined towards believing the battery, a wire doesn't know what color it is.
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I think it would be sufficient to require any advertising for the thing to name it's most prominent feature as "this is a piece of crap that will be out of support in 5 years and was sabotaged to not be repairable". Something akin to the warnings on cigarettes. A free market solution (many models of free market assume rational and well-informed customers, and in any case well-informed customers are key to market efficiency).
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free market solution LOL
You think such a specialized need is going to get a good solution from the "free market"? What you get from the free market is exactly what is described here, absurd overcharging and continuous exploitation.
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What I'm saying is uninformed customers cause a failure/inefficiency of the free market.
Re:Pretty Cunniving for the Company (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm saying is uninformed customers cause a failure/inefficiency of the free market.
There is no free market for medical devices. The FDA approval process is so onerous and heavyweight that most companies won't even think about entering that market, and the few companies that do are in it to milk the insurance companies for every penny they can get out of them. And the people who actually use the devices aren't paying for them, and usually have little say in what gets prescribed by a doctor anyway, meaning that it usually doesn't matter how informed they are, because the true customers are insurance companies.
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Even so, I think the warning label I suggested would make insurance companies think twice (or the end-user think twice about their insurance company).
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The ACA capped the insurance companies' profits at a percentage of expenditures on care.
If they have to buy something more often for more money that means they get to pocket more profit. They will just take the money from the other members of the plan.
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Right and before the onerous approval process you had snake oil salesmen selling miracle cures.
We havent gotten rid the snake oil salesmen but at least we can protect some
onerous regulations have reasons. Just because you are too stupid understand why. Doesnt mean everyone elese is.
Re:Pretty Cunniving for the Company (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, so you haven't realized yet that insurance is a fraud committed on society to benefit shareholders?
You misspelled for-profit healthcare. In an ideal world, for-profit companies would have no role in medical care at any level, including insurance companies, but also including hospitals, drug companies, contracting firms that provide medical clinics to corporations, etc. Everything would be non-profit by law. Making profit on healthcare is preying on the desperate to make a buck for people who had no role in their care, which is way worse than mere fraud. It's sociopathic predatory dealing.
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How far are you going to take this?
- The catering companies providing the meals in hospitals?
- The farmers providing the food that is used by the catering companies?
- The laundry services washing the uniforms?
- The uniform manufacturers?
- The textile workers sewing the uniforms?
- Are individual clinicians allowed to take a salary? Can they set up shop individually in your mind?
The kind of argument you're making is had all the time in the NHS here in the UK, and has been had for at least 30 years. But there'
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While I understand your sentiment here....my question is...without incentive to make a profit, what is driving innovation for new things like a transformers like exoskeleton to help this guy walk in the first place? What drives discovery and development of new medicines?
That type thing just does NOT come from govt. these days...
I think there needs to be a healthy balance, but I dunno where that would even start to be.
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"in an ideal world"
Guess what man? The world isn't ideal. It's dirty and real.
That's why no "ideology" works in practice. Capitalism, communism, any of the other varieties of Marxism - they all have horrible effects when implemented because the world isn't ideal.
The problem isn't "for profit healthcare", as you seem to think. The problem is that people are people. YOu could trade this system for one with long wait lines for basic care and euthanasia for undesirables, like Canada has; or you could trade it f
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Medical devices are different. If the company services that 10-year old exoskeleton, and next month it malfunctions and twists the guy into a pretzel, the company is probably on the hook for his lifetime care, which can be near-infinite. Easily half a million a
This is what the jockey gets for (Score:2, Funny)
...horsing around.
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Pretty sure he wouldn't care, but one can be of good character and still make light of a situation. Maybe you should get off your high horse and worry about your own character? Constantly judging others for petty shit is stupid and a sign of low character in itself.
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Guess it shouldn't surprise me that there are sociopaths on Slashdot that think making fun of someone with a severe disability that's not their fault is somehow 'funny' and worthy of making jokes, they're probably the same jackasses who support fascist pigs like Trump and most so-called 'Republicans' in thi
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Re:This is what the jockey gets for (Score:4, Funny)
Rick is offended! You heard it here, first. Straight from the horse's mouth!
Get your bets in early... (Score:2)
How long until there's a Rossman-Rant up on youtube?
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It just like his type of red meat to go after.
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He is completely correct in doing so. While I don't really see a need for "requirement that OEM services it indefinitely", requiring service manuals and spare parts be made available on request at a reasonable profit margin should be required in case of things with this kind of cost and importance.
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Thats how most sensible countries do it. Here in australia theres a lifetime warranty on everything for *manufacturer* defects or shit caused by the manufacturer without the customers consent (Theres a unsprung trap btw regarding all those games who get their servers deactivated making single player unavailable. In Australia, and MOST of europe, that somewhat straightforwardly means the game must. be refunded). Likewise with having parts and tools available for independent repair.
For whatever reason the US
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That is not in fact how it's done anywhere in the world. For example EU is only starting to adopt some right to repair legislation. And no, scenario you described does not result in a good that has been rendered inoperable being fully refunded, but in evaluation of how much value was gained during time of ownership, and only the difference between that and sum paid is reimbursed.
The amount involved is in fact why many European nations have a bureaucratic entity that spends a large portion of its time genera
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Storytime:
Once I wanted an appointment to talk to one of my congressweasels. I called their office, identified myself as a constituent, and was then told that the best I could get was to meet with a staffer
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Utterly reprehensible. (Score:2)
time to start suing (Score:3)
I'd start with the difference between what the old exoskeleton is worth and what a new one costs. In the future these companies can work out a support contract for another company to do the work past a certain time frame.
I mean if the auto industry has to keep catalytic converters in a warehouse for decades to support the repair industry then everyone in healthcare can do the same as the bare minimum.
Americans lack the will to change (Score:4, Insightful)
Both parties in the United States are owned lock, stock and barrel by Corporate America. Corporate America wants you to buy another device, not fix the one you have. In fact, they would prefer that you face legal consequences if you fix the one you have.
This will not change as long as Americans stay fat, sassy and willfully ignorant. Turning up every few years to vote for candidates who have already been selected for them by their corporate masters won't change anything. There is a long, uphill fight ahead if American citizens are ever going to get their country back from the Corporate Parasitocracy.
Re:Americans lack the will to change (Score:5, Informative)
Both parties in the United States are owned lock, stock and barrel by Corporate America. Corporate America wants you to buy another device, not fix the one you have.
California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Oregon have all recently passed "right to repair" laws.
All are blue states.
So, at least one party doesn't appear to be owned by corporate America.
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The game is to claim they are so you can justify voting for the one that is more damaging to society.
It's the "no, you are!" defense.
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You're right, but it's a drop in the bucket. And, of course, there's the problem of enforcement. Apple has been notorious for slow-walking the process, and has encountered very little resistance from at least some of the states you mention.
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I shit you not.
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I've had largely the SAME experience with Apple and my apple products.
I've had LONG out of warranty things, that I did originally buy apple care for....that failed or broke, not due to my abuse.
I took them in, w
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You are correct with your information about right to repair laws. However your statement, "So, at least one party doesn't appear to be owned by corporate America" is only partly true. Both parties are formed from an amalgamation of many, many other groups of various size and influence, and they agree to put their support behind that particular party in exchange for concessions that the party will fight for. In general the groups that represent corporate interests have been aligned with the republican par
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I find your post fascinating, thank you.
Maybe my view is distorted by privilege as a skilled white collar worker in an internationally sought-after profession, but I can't help but think there is some futiity in fighting globalism. How long can protectionism work before the rest of the world finds a better way and leaves us behind. What then is the next step, war (and would we win) ?
I do see that in the short term the fight against globalism and immigration has an air of pragmatism about it, but ultimately
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Typical component obsolescense case ? (Score:2)
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Also, 10 years IS a long time for an electronics design. How many devices do you use at home which are that old?
Many [w140.com]. And I can still get tubes for them.
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I have a lot of 10+-year-old electronic devices I still use often. My Roku 2. A Linux PC and a Linux notebook. My electronic piano. My (landline) phones. My DVD player. A Blue Mic Yeti microphone. A bunch of computer monitors.
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To be fair, a lot of electronics will break earlier than that and not because of some evil manufacturer thing, but because capacitors leak, resistors and connections corrode and so on.
It would be nice if service manuals were made available so that skilled individuals could just replace damaged parts. But most electronics with complex boards will generally struggle to go through a decade without something going wrong due to corrosion or ageing.
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In an indoor environment not subject to events like flooding or similar, electronic components like capacitors and resistors last a long time and connections don't corrode easily, unless the components/construction are seriously sub-standard.
I bet the US military has some planes still flying with 1980s-era electronic components. Granted, milspec components are better quality than the regular stuff for civilian use, but still... electronic components are pretty reliable.
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This is because many things are manufactured for an intended lifespan. Intentions can be both good or bad. This introduces economies that everyone may enjoy, as well as opportunities for a large disconnect between the lifespan the consume expects vs the lifespan the manufacturer was going for.
I want my motherboards to last a decade or more. There was a period there not long ago
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The capacitor plague was because a Chinese company was cloning (and perhaps counterfeiting) capacitors from major manufacturers, but doing so with faulty stolen intel so they left one of the electrolyte components out. There's a reason these smell particularly fishy when they explode. But in the first couple years, you'd be hard pressed to tell there was a problem, which is how so many got into the production pipeline. It wasn't a massive conspiracy by motherboard manufacturers, it was a much smaller, much
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It's also worth remembering that this problem has been mostly fixed too. While capacitors certainly still may leak or corrode as they age, that specific mode of failure has been addressed in the supply chain. It's mostly just natural wear and tear rather than manufacturing defect getting deep into supply chain now.
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>I want my motherboards to last a decade or more
Then you have to do what we do with all hardware we want to last. Yearly maintenance. Pull it out, get it under the microscope. Inspect for signs of early corrosion. Clean. Inspect for early signs of capacitor failures. Replace those that show signs. Measure specific voltages on potential failure points. Address the problems they may show, like traces getting faulty. You may need to get a small hand drill and drill out traces showing signs of failure and ju
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That moment when you're so ignorant, you don't understand just how incredibly complex modern motherboards are compared to something like an typical car engine.
Moving parts do not equal complexity, nor do static parts equal no wear and tear.
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It's not the quality, it's the size and capability that increased these problems. Massive old resistors don't care much about tiny spec of corrosion, because it's probably less than 10% of its contact area. Modern tiny capacitor cares very much because that same sized spec is closer to 100%.
We really miniaturized components very well over time, which enables much more complex boards and layouts. But that comes with the price that they're much more sensitive to things like corrosion.
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I have no idea what your household environment is like, but I see no corrosion on even 10+-year-old electronics when I take a look inside.
There's no reason a quality-build electronic device's hardware shouldn't last 20+ years if it's not abused.
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10 years IS a long time for an electronics design. How many devices do you use at home which are that old ?
My office digital receiver (really, a DAC that swings so much juice it powers speakers directly) is 20 years old. Daily use 12+ hrs / day. It's sweet as tubes and is a right banger. Listening to Mass in B Minor (Bach, by Robert Shaw Chorale) right now at realistic levels. Yum.
My HT receiver is 9 years old. It sees 2 to 4 hrs a night. The previous one was retired at age 10 because it doesn't have HDMI. A friend has it now, it's his office hi-fi. It's identical to my office receiver. Sees pretty much
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So Tell Us the Fucking Company's Name (Score:2)
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So Tell Us the Fucking Company's Name
It's in the 2nd line of TFS. Says it right there. Right after how much it cost.
10 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
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If it cost $100K, I'd expect it to be serviced for 25+ years.
Re:10 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want 25 years its going to cost a hell of a lot more than $100k
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I said that the thing should be serviced for 25 years. Sure, it might break in less than 25 years, but you should be able to get parts and get it repaired for up to 25 years (which I bet you can with most cars... you can still easily get parts for 1999 model year cars.)
Re:10 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right to repair, yes. Right the service, no. We frown on slavery.
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The way it's usually implemented is that sellers are required to also make available the service manual and sell replacement parts for a period of time.
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That would make the product cost at least double, even higher if the product does not have a high enough volume, which I am not sure this exoskeleton does. Want to see an example, check out Fluke multi-meters. You can buy ones for less than half price, which look near identical, perform just as well (or better), and yet, why do some people buy the Fluke one? You can watch the video linked below for more details, but spoiler alert, it's the long term support that makes people pay more than twice the money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Excellent observation. I often shake my head when people cry-bully manufacturers to get support way beyond what is reasonable. I work in industrial control, and we use a lot of Rockwell ControlLogix PACs, these guys are not the most expensive available, but they do get a little spendy. A processor runs you around $8000. It's a quad-core ARM no more powerful than a $100 Raspberry Pi driving the thing, but what you are paying for is the ecosystem of support that exists around the it.
When the power is out and
Re: 10 years? (Score:2)
I must be missing somethining (Score:2)
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This is a poor poster for right to repair. The picture of a standard lithium cell with a standard JST connector in a case that appears to have been opened without any undue difficulty really hurts its credibility.
But the guy and his story are pitiable, so if wires make you nervous then sure.
lose all patents in it after ending support (Score:2)
anything sold with patents should have those patents voided if support is ended on a product. opening up support to any interested third parties.
that should create incentive for companies to support products they are still profiting on directly or indirectly. or it opens those abandoned products up to the free market.
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what does it mean that something is "sold with patents"? And why should patents be "voided" based on any unrelated activity? Do you even know what a patent is?
Companies can be more directly regulated to solve such problems. For example, requiring such support for products that need it.
Perhaps your house should be burned down if you are late paying your cell phone bill. "that should create incentive" too.
Already resolved (Score:5, Informative)
This became local TV news: https://www.facebook.com/100004871323153/videos/841245831410108/
It appears that the publicity worked, and his device is functional again: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/yMYEJwGPagHynyW1/
It's not that easy to replace (Score:2)
This isn't like a pair of shoes where you just get a new style when the old one is discontinued. Even if money is no object, the new exoskeleton will be different and he would have to re-re-learn to walk. Imagine if getting a new style of shoes meant you'd be falling on your face for a couple months. Now add in that you have limited mobility so getting back up is challenging at best.
Proprietary watch (Score:2)
Man, if the watch was just a standard Apple or Android watch with an app, it would be so much easier to replace.
Apple watch is 9 years old, but Android watches have been around longer than 10 years.
But (Score:2)
But there is one thing we need to think about.
FTSummary: ""We have all this technology we release into the wild and it changes people's lives, but there's no long-term thinking. Manufacturers currently have no legal obligation to support the equipment indefinitely and there's no requirements that they publish sufficient documentation to allow others to do it," Proctor said."
This is not even an RTF
Please un-paywall link to original 404media story (Score:2)
Hey! Let's fuck over some cripples! (Score:2)
Sounds like a plan, JR. You da man!
Shareholders will lick your spittle.
And you want to... (Score:2)
Upload your mind to a computer. Yep... sorry, you uploaded more than five years ago, we're not going to move your upload to new storage. Bye!
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I don't even believe the story in the first place. Who believes $100K medical devices of which people may depend on for their lives are supported like disposable electronics? Or regulated as such?
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He enjoyed the experimental device for a decade.
Its time to move on.
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Being able to get to the bathroom when you need it is a massive improvement to quality of life over having to lie in bed with a colostomy bag and a catheter.