$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."

Re:Bad Planning

[rmdingler]

Is the explanation as simple as:

The government foots the bill as these are mostly used by war veterans, so for the manufacturer, it's another unit sold?

Re:Bad Planning

[Libertarian_Geek]

Last time I checked, the government doesn't earn money. Taxpayers do.

Security

[jbmartin6]

The article doesn't specify why they need to replace the hand rather than just do a software reset. But my first thought was of all those stories a while ago about security on diabetic pumps, and I thought "Well now we know why there shouldn't be security on these devices"

Re:I see three possibilities

[kdataman]

I am the submitter and the layout of the original submission was much different with a new paragraph there.