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$75K Prosthetic Arm Is Bricked When Paired iPod Is Stolen
kdataman writes U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Ben Eberle, who lost an arm and both legs in Afghanistan, had his Ipod Touch stolen on Friday. This particular Ipod Touch has an app on it that controls his $75,000 prosthetic arm. The robbery bricked his prosthesis: "That is because Eberle's prosthetic hand is programmed to only work with the stolen iPod, and vice versa. Now that the iPod is gone, he said he has to get a new hand and get it reprogrammed with his prosthesis." I see three possibilities: 1) The article is wrong, possibly to guilt the thief into returning the Ipod. 2) This is an incredibly bad design by Touch Bionics. Why would you make a $70,000 piece of equipment permanently dependent on a specific Ipod Touch? Ipods do fail or go missing. 3) This is an intentionally bad design to generate revenue. Maybe GM should do this with car keys? "Oops, lost the keys to the corvette. Better buy a new one."
I recently sat through a Touch Bionics seminar and, at least for the newer devices, all you need to do is enter the "serial number" of the hand into the app and it can control it. We even joked about how easy it was, so friends with prosthetic hands could prank each other by entering their friend's serial number into their own app and controlling their friend's hand. This may just apply to new devices though, maybe in response to problems like this?