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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."
What if the ipod was dropped and breaks? What kind of poor planning is this where that one ipod was the linchpin of this expensive prosthetic?
MABASPLOOM!
Except the terribly bad design we typically see in embedded design is normally to provide a back-door way to prevent just this kind of problem. "Oh, you lost your password? No problem, hold down these three buttons and cycle power and it'll reset everything to factory defaults, and then you can login with this default password."
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding how the entire device could be permanently bricked, even in the case of a poor design. Instead of replacing the entire $70k arm, surely they could swap out a chip or circuit board somewhere...?
Why is that bad design? It allows access to the system again, but in a way that makes it pretty fecking obvious access has been gained - thats how I would like it to be handled rather than the alternatives of never gaining access or gaining unfettered access with all data in place and no one being aware access was gained.
Exactly. Especially when the reset to factory requires physical presence. In most cases it is exactly the right thing.