Michael Straight said Lifeward refused to repair his $100,000 exoskeleton, which only had a minor issue with its battery.

A former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident was able to walk again thanks to a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton.

When one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working. Desperate to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs. But it turned him away, claiming his exoskeleton was too old, *404 media *reports.

“After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy,” Michael Straight posted on Facebook earlier this month. “The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money.”

  • @[email protected]English
    30•2 months ago

    This is something I wish cyberpunk media touched more on.

    One thing I always thought about when playing cyberpunk 2077 is why wouldn’t companies have a failsafe for their equipment being used against them. In the game, you can use cyber decks from Arisaka and Militech and be able to hack and assault their infrastructure and employees with impunity.

    I am not really sure companies would allow that…

    • @IIIEnglish
      15•2 months ago

      Overlooking the concept of a failsafe? How did they get past the concept of the subscription model?

      • @BilliamBobertsEnglish
        6•2 months ago

        I always imagined that it was due to a higher level of computer literacy amongst the consumer population. An hour after a corpo releases a new piece of tech under a subscription model, the software has been cracked and pirated all over the net.

    • @[email protected]English
      11•2 months ago

      Presumably those failsafes can be circumvented and your character being a cool hacker applies those exploits to their hardware.

    • @aestheleteEnglish
      9•2 months ago

      why wouldn’t companies have a failsafe for their equipment being used against them

      Because they got tired of paying for the whiny engineers that would have to implement the failsafe and so they fired them all.

      • @IIIEnglish
        11•2 months ago

        so they fired them all

        Even fictional evil companies need to meet goals set by the board.

    • @drunkpostdisasterEnglish
      8•2 months ago

      That’s the problem with cyberpunk as a genre. Its to cool. The first Deus Ex did it right. If it was in the hands of a better developer Watch Dogs could have too.