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Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 month ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Apologies for posting a pay walled article. Consider subscribing to 404. They’re a journalist-founded org, so you could do worse for supporting quality journalism.

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.

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.