$75K Prosthetic Arm Is Bricked When Paired iPod Is Stolen 194
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."
Bad Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is that bad design? It allows access to the system again, but in a way that makes it pretty fecking obvious access has been gained - thats how I would like it to be handled rather than the alternatives of never gaining access or gaining unfettered access with all data in place and no one being aware access was gained.
Re:Prosthetic arm hacking FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Especially when the reset to factory requires physical presence. In most cases it is exactly the right thing.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bollox. Bad design is built in on purpose. Some manager or above explicitly told the programmer to build that dependency in. Been there, done that, fought against it and was categorically told do it or lose my job.
Never assume a skilled professional makes a terrible decision. It has to be coded and someone makes that call above a programmer's pay-grade.
I'd say it's more likely that some manager told their programmer to make absolutely sure that no other iPod than his could possibly control his prosthetics to avoid the possibility of some jokester deciding it would be fun it he took control of someone's arms.
Strange software design (Score:4, Insightful)
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.