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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."
Who?
The guy in the article?
The article?
The editor?
The submitter?
At least start a new paragraph..
He'll be right. He is from the ARMy after all.
You know, given the terrible kind of software we see in embedded software, and the terrible security implemented by most companies ... I'm perfectly willing to believe this is an incredibly bad design, because there's plenty of evidence that these kinds of things tend to have incredibly bad designs.
Between companies using 10 year old Linux kernels, to having unpatchable systems, or just having really bad understandings of security, I've come to conclude this is the norm.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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!
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?
The guy who stole it could now be controlling his hand. "Now hand over your wallet! No, wait... I'll do it! Bwahahahahah!" Small favors and all that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seriously, they charge an arm and a leg for prosthetic limbs!
=Smidge=
The article doesn't specify why they need to replace the hand rather than just do a software reset. But my first thought was of all those stories a while ago about security on diabetic pumps, and I thought "Well now we know why there shouldn't be security on these devices"
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
According to the user manual for i-limb,
To make changes to the limb, it either requires loading the software on a pc with blue-tooth or getting an ipod touch setup by i-limb.
Not a $75,000 loss by any means, sounds like the factory has to set up the ipod touch though. It is a pain in the rump, but most robberies are.
Shouldn't the app be an Android app?
Hmmmm?
Possibility 4) Hardlinking to a specific iPod makes it harder to hack the prosthetic arm from.
Bricking a device because a external independent device which is well known to be fragile and/or a target of theft has died/lost/stolen is a pretty bad design.
And if the external device is not independent, but is in fact required part of the bricked devices operation - then that is also bad design
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Apple removed the ability for iOS apps to read the iPhone's / iPad's / iPod's device id with iOS 7, which means any software that relied on that would no longer work.
Does it seem odd to anyone else that he'd be fine with leaving the device in his truck's center console overnight that's required to make use of one of his arms?
"Pretty sure I won't come up with ANY need to use my other arm for the rest of the night.... Maybe I'll go fetch the controller tomorrow?"
Hi, I'm a volunteer for The Math Foundation, the non-profit devoted to helping everyday people do math, because Math Is Hard(tm). After careful calculations, I have concluded that replacing all of your keys via the dealerships costs more than two orders of magnitude less than purchasing a new set of cars, which means you could purchase over 100 cars for the cost of a set of keys, on average. You can now safely take the "new keys" option with the assurance that it is the wiser financial path between the two, and you no longer have to lie awake at night wondering whether or not the "new cars" option would be cheaper.
The software detects weak signals from damaged nerves to usefully move fingers of the prostetic arm. This is no floppy bird. There was probably an incredible amount of difficulty to get the thing working in the first place and the issue of backup was left for later. One day these things would be both modular and not cost $70k.
I had my dog chipped but the vet said that if I ever let my iPhone run out of battery the implant will explode. I think the implant was made by the same company.
I'm not familiar with the device, but the engineer in me want's to believe that no one would design a system with such an obvious weakness.
I run a company that makes wiring harnesses and I am an engineer (as well as an accountant) myself. I assure you that there are a LOT of idiots who would would design such a stupid system. I get to deal with some of them on a semi-regular basis.
We like to pretend here on slashdot that engineers are universally good at their job and always do quality work but I have several file cabinets full of evidence 10 feet from where I sit that proves that too many engineers are monumentally incompetent idiots. On a daily basis I see drawings that are incomplete, incorrect, badly designed, occasionally dangerous, specify incompatible or needlessly expensive parts, difficult or impossible to read, sloppy, cannot be manufactured and even just plain incoherent. I have seen precisely 7 product drawings (out of hundreds) in the last 5 years where I could build the product detailed on the print without asking even a single question or correcting some error. This is quite simply bad engineering by people who aren't very good at their jobs.
The fun part of engineering is figuring out a clever solution to a problem. The harder and less fun part of engineering (but probably the more important part) is documenting the solution in such a way that others can understand and replicate your solution and adjust/debug it if necessary. People who can write good quality work instructions are a shocking rarity even among very smart people. A lot of engineers will take easy shortcuts even when it results in a worse and more expensive product in the long run.
Apple doesn't allow access to UDIDs (universal device identifiers) anymore, so unless the software is quite old, or requires a jailbroken device, the prosthesis cannot be paired to the device. (That's one of the reason why you can't access the UDID anymore, because pairing information with a device is stupid; the bigger reason is privacy).
The prosthesis can easily be paired to an AppleID plus an application specific ID. However, all information about this would be stored on the device, backed up to iTunes, and could be restored by just buying a new phone, entering the AppleID and password, and downloading the last backup.
If that doesn't work, then these guys must have some really strange and stupid software design + implementation.
Hi, I'm a volunteer for the Poetic License bureau, and we'd like to inform you that you've violated rule #8; taking something too literally when an obvious point is being made.
You're welcome.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)