Slashdot Mirror
$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."
He'll be right. He is from the ARMy after all.
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?
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 am the submitter and the layout of the original submission was much different with a new paragraph there.
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...?
You should have gone with a more reputable news aggregation service like FARK or 4chan. Their editors are top notch compared to Slashdot.
$70k is the standard repair fee for prosthetics not covered under an Applecare agreement.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
the iPod has an ARM processor.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.