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Trained repair professionals at hospitals are regularly unable to fix medical devices because of manufacturer lockout codes or the inability to obtain repair parts. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, broken ventilators sat unrepaired for weeks or months as manufacturers were overwhelmed with repair requests and independent repair professionals were locked out of them. At the time, I reported that independent repair techs had resorted to creating DIY dongles loaded with jailbroken Ukrainian firmware to fix ventilators without manufacturer permission. Medical device manufacturers also threatened iFixit because it posted ventilator repair manuals on its website. I have also written about people with sleep apnea who have hacked their CPAP machines to improve their basic functionality and to repair them.
PS: he got it repaired.
there is absolutely no excuse for this
corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
Line must go 🆙
any company who locks medical device repair should be burned to the ground. and dont bullshit me about liabilities bla it is more likely cash grab which they get in the form of “extra care packages” or exorbitant repair prices charged after the guarantee period ends.
A right to repair is long overdue but more than that when it comes to medical devices it’s obvious battery replacement is going to be necessary and should be user accessible.
Corporations are a fucking curse.
Update: He temporarily gained the ability to walk again after touching a spinning steel ball, despite the recovery not lasting he will still be competing in upcoming cross country horse race.
Keeping repairs locked into your system of parts/techs can at least feign “safety” or “quality”.
But essentially just refusing to repair is an absolute fuck you.
I’ve started choosing the companies I use based much more on the experience offered when their product/service DOESN’T work, rather than when it does.
I’ve started choosing the companies I use based much more on the experience offered when their product/service DOESN’T work, rather than when it does.
Easy to do for a cell phone or a toaster, but I can’t imagine there’s a ton of options for exosuits that correct your condition, covered by your insurance, that your doctor is familiar enough with to prescribe (for lack of a better term).
Some things are annoying to make abandonware, and some things should be criminal.
Don’t buy a Google Pixel. I’ll never get one again because of this. They wanted 250£ to even look at it so I got a new cheap Samsung out of spite.
And it doesn’t preclude the company just deciding your product is no longer worth supporting/going bankrupt.
It might have been fine and seemingly trustworthy to begin with, and then it stops, a few years down the line.
Right it begs the question.
Is me not receiving care or having access to care REALLY better for me?
If the answer can’t clearly be yes, then they are just choosing to make me ill or kill me for their perceived interests.
For me it’s a mix of what you said and how they treat their employees/where they’re making the product.
I spend extra time trying to find higher priced, higher quality, more fairly manufactured products.
That latter requirement is usually a good indicator of the former requirement. Companies that take care of their people typically end up making quality products.
As its paywalled I can’t see the article and any pictures clearer, but from the image shown isn’t that those tiny battery packs you can use for RC drones etc? Because those things are dirty fucking cheap, I would be furious if that was a $100,000 charge.
I think the entire exoskeleton is $100k not the battery.
I agree, 404 is legit journalism. No org is perfect, but they’re as good as it gets.
Medical devices are required to comply with 21 CFR 820 in the United States, which establishes quality management standards. This includes minimum standards for the software development lifecycle, including software verification and validation testing.
In the EU, broadly equivalent standards include ISO 13485 and IEC 62304.
If an OEM wants to do a software update, they at minimum need to perform and document a change impact analysis, verification testing, and regression testing. Bigger changes can involve a new FDA submission process.
If you go around hacking new software features into your medical device, you are almost certainly not doing all of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that your software changes are low quality–maybe, maybe not. But it would be completely unfair to hold your device to the standard that the FDA holds them to–that medical devices in the United States are safe and effective treatments for diseases.
This may be okay if you want to hack your own CPAP (usually a class II device) and never sell it to someone else. But I think we all need to acknowledge that there are some serious risks here.
Yeah, I’m a big right to repair person. But medical equipment is a different level. This isn’t just affecting yourself, if a tech screws up people die.
Sure, there are risks, but if there alternatives are pony up $100k for a new exosuit, or just don’t fucking walk again, I see why repair is an enticing option.
repair techs had resorted to creating DIY dongles loaded with jailbroken Ukrainian firmware to fix ventilators without manufacturer permission
How many jailbreaks are done by Ukrainian hackers? Wasn’t the John Deere firmware from Ukraine as well? Nice job 💖
Ukraine produces more than its fair share of excellent programmers.
Russia as well, lots of former soviet states. I used to talk to a Latvian maths student who was adamant it was the access to free/cheap higher education and poor job prospects.
The right to repair is such an obvious good in the world that those opposed to it should be publicly shamed.
These companies don’t give a single shit about shame. They care about money.
Public shaming should include widespread boycotting and possibly more direct actions.
None of that is a substitute for government regulation. They must be forced to comply.
None of that is a substitute for government regulation.
I mean, it absolutely is, if/when it works.
I was thinking more direct actions but sure we can try government regulation first.
I mean, If we’re talking about imposing vigilante justice on criminal corporate execs, I guess I’m down with that too.
The CPAP lockout is something I went through. The company behind my CPAP does not allow you to get ANYTHING off the device. But there is an SD Card that you can get all the info you want from your old system. Its arbitrarily locked out.
You are also unable to repair anything on the device without insurance getting involved. And insurance is often at OEM prices (think 200+ for a basic mask). Thankfully, people have illegally added STLs/chips/parts/etc… online that you can basically reverse engineer the entire device nowadays. As long as you use medical safe materials, it saves you literally thousands of dollars. Ive replaced quite a few parts and the device is still working after many years of usage.
When my mother died, I couldn’t even donate her new and expensive insulin pump. Somebody needed to make money, it certainly wasn’t me or the diabetic who might not have to buy one. I just wanted someone to have it who needed it and I didn’t need the money. Somebody always needs to get paid, and somebody always needs to pay and jump through hoops.
Like anything medically related in the US, it’s our time to crack open our wallets and do our patriotic duty of paying half the nation.
Like, if I want to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes, then it’s my time to pay the all the insurance industry workers, and I have to pay my part of those 3 minutes long drug commercials you see on TV every ad break and before every YouTube video, and I have to pay all those people locking down the medical devices so that the users can’t use their own data. This is my time to shine, I got to pay for all this because I talked to the doctor for 5 minutes. Also, hopefully in the end I have a few cents left over to give to the doctor.
Fucking rent seekers…
This is what Louis Rossmann has been screaming and fighting about for years. It’s the most fucked up shit ever. It is affecting our food supplies and we are not paying attention to it.
Here is a some what related video, $200000 to Mobility Independence Foundation; Thomas Quiter’s guide through the wheelchair industry - Louis Rossmann. It a pretty long video at 1 hour and 11 minutes but I felt it was worth the watch because my unfamiliarity with the topic.
Do you have a source on the food supply angle? Sounds interesting and enraging.
Here is one video of many he has made about John Deere and how they’re being absolute scums of the earth. Louis actually helped the farmers win some cases in several states. A lot of people on the internet love to shit on Rossmann (mostly about his personality), but the man has been tremendous work. He’s a fucking fighter.
Yeah, just search up right to repair farm equipment, just linking one or two articles won’t give you the scope of the problem the way seeing how much it has been covered, but not changed.
I got family that farms independent, and it’s pretty much the single biggest factor in profitability over time. Those machines can cost as much, or more, than a nice house, and you’re locked in to inflated service and parts costs.
Enraging doesn’t honestly do the problem justice.
This isn’t a “google it” thing, it’s really about actually seeing the search results first hand. We’re talking pages of hits going back decades.
Short of it is that John Deere is preventing farmers from repairing their own tractors. How much it threatens the food supply, I’m not sure, but there is an obvious connection.
This is correct. And the connection is major. I, as a former farmer, can tell you that repairing my own equipments is a matter of life or death (for my crops). Rice for example, required a constant stream of cold(riger temp cold) and fresh water for 6 months straight. Non-stop. If my diesel powered water pump breaks and I can’t fix it, I only have a couple of days (if at all) to fix it, otherwise, all that rice is just dead. So, I always had parts available at my house for just in case. I’d also had two diesel water pumps at the river, in case one broke and took a while to fix, so I can fire up the second one. Same thing with my harvesting machine… the list goes on and on. It’s absolutely essential that farmers fix their own equipments. What John Deere is doing should make every human being angry, because this is our food they’re messing with.
I’ve also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren’t able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn’t replace because of manufacturer lockouts.
