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.”
Oh, yea, I get the safety angle, but that work has already been done.
If I’m replacing a battery in something like thsas long as I use the same tech, where’s the concern?
If the factory battery has built-in BMS, then I should use the same, that’s about the only concern I’d have. And if it’s NiMH, well, even less of a concern.
And for this use-case, I wouldn’t be cheap on my replacements, like I am for stuff that’s low risk (like a flashlight that lives in a metal cabinet outside - if that lithium does a runaway, there’s little risk).