Gee, would’ve been a shame if the people decide to take the means of productions from the rich snobs
This is going to be a very random comment. Apparently today as I was waking up, I muttered “Marx was right” to my husband who was awake and lying in bed. I have no recollection of this. I don’t know wtf I was dreaming about, but I love the clarity, lol.
This is a long way to say I agree with you.
Transcript:
on Tumblr:
ironbound-oberon: I have cochlear implants and I can only buy parts to fix or upgrade them from 1 corporation bc of tech exclusivity. Upgrades to get new processors for both ears cost $23k & insurance only covers 90% (and it’s “good” insurance). Cyberpunk dystopia is already here for the disabled. Fight for universal healthcare, fight against capitalism NOW.
dovewithscales: I want all the abled people reading this to go price check a power wheelchair.
I used to build wheelchairs… facts
all disability accomodation tech should be 100% free (gratis AND libre)
To me this mostly isn’t a universal healthcare issue, it’s a right to repair issue. Everyone that reads this should support both concepts.
It’s also a medical devices being expensive in general issue. If you build something and you want it to get cleared for medical use you need to test the shit out of it and get several kinds of certification. And you need to do it all over everytime you make any change whatsoever. This can easily take two years for every change, even if you just change something trivial.
All of this is to prevent another Therac-25. For the uninitiated: That was a radiotherapy device that, due to design flaws on several levels, could inadvertantly be turned into a literal death ray. Several patients died because of this. In the aftermath, the regulations for medical decides were tightened considerably.
That’s a major part of why medical devices are so insanely expensive. Much of what you’re paying for is a titanic amount of certification work.
Unfortunately, this also makes it harder to implement a right to repair for these. Few people want to figure out who is responsible when e.g. a CPAP device that someone repaired themselves fails. The current approach is to make it damn near impossible for the manufacturers to screw up but that’s a lot harder when the device can ever be in a configuration that hasn’t been extensively tested and certified.
The fact it makes everything expensive and proprietary is just an unfortunate side effect.
I don’t buy the “testing makes it so expensive” rationale unless I see the actual source numbers. Every bicycle made in Europe, the US, or Taiwan goes through an extensive ISO-defined testing process that is every bit as rigorous as that of a hearing aid yet somehow they all arrive in shops with reasonable sticker prices, and they often have production runs with smaller numbers than those implants. Yes testing will obviously increase cost, but show me the paperwork for the process that brings a single hearing aid part to $23K. It doesn’t exist. The goldfish is merely growing to fill the bowl, and the bowl is private insurance.
it was a choclear implant, its likely is more complicated than a simple hearing aid.
I think any company that is sunsetting a product with existing customers still using it should offer full refunds or a way to operate it without the company.
Cloud services have no incentive to continue operating unless they charge ‘rent’ as servers and maintenance is not free. However, if they choose to use proprietary ways to protect their IP, they should also have an obligation. If they choose to not have that obligation, they lose the IP and open source it.
medical equipment is probably one of those that need a technician to repair, cant really do it on your own.
all disability tech should be forced to be libre
all abandonware should be forced to be libre
YEAR OF THE LINUX EYES (Eye use Arch btw)
Subscriptions for necessities. Subscriptions to live.
You have reached your character limit for the week. Deposit another $20 for another ten characters, valid for the next half-hour.
Drink verification can.
Fucking rent
Generic person:
Well boo hoo, what did you do to get that / should’ve cared more / been more careful.
Later:
Boohoo, I didn’t think it would affect me! Now it’s serious!
Generic Republican. Leftists have empathy.
I will always repost this article: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported - Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
“I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”
It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.
all disability tech should be forced to be libre
all abandonware should be forced to be libre
YEAR OF THE LINUX EYES (Eye use Arch btw)
Basic models: Starting around $1,200 to $2,000 for travel chairs.
Mid-range options: Typically between $2,500 and $5,000.
High-end models: Can exceed $10,000 for advanced features and customization.
Customized models: Prices can go up to $5,000+ for specialized needs.
should be $0
Governments should subsidize these things
and force the software to be libre
NotAWheelchair (owned by YouTuber Jerryrig Everything) sells custom models for 1,200 to $2,000. Not sure if the customization they offer is everything you meant, but they seem to be offering some competition to the market.
Seems pretty reasonable to me, not sure what their point was. The ear implants are crazy, wheelchairs aren’t.
Seems pretty reasonable to an able-bodied person who can pull an income. A ton of disabled people cannot, and US medicaid often has disgustingly low limits.
Yeah wheelchairs look to be around hearing aid prices by that, though with much more room on both ends (yeah I know you can get dirt cheap HAs that are the auditory equivalent of reading glasses, but they’re the auditory equivalent of reading glasses)
i don’t know anyone who needs a power chair who doesn’t need a customized one. try again.
wdym
My neighbor has one.
But do they need a customized one? Have you ever asked them?
If it goes in your body or is required for normal human function, it should be open source.
Everything should be open source, but let’s start there.
Agreed.
At the very least, all design and code should be held in escrow, to be released immediately if the company stops maintaining it.
In theory, that’s part of what a patent is supposed to do: the design is filed with the patent office, and after the course of the patent has run out, other companies have the design and the legal right to make competing products. I kind of wonder if making software patentable could help the open source movement.
Software patents are very common and no, this has not helped the open source movement.
In the US at least, code itself cannot be patented. A means of accomplishing something with software can, but not the code itself. This means that all the patent office receives is a diagram of what the software is supposed to do, rather than its source code. Having the source code publicly-available could help the open-source movement.
Care and progress for the disabled has always been an open door for corporations to test new technology on a truly captivated audience. The absurdly high costs and exclusivity is often how the public justifies to themselves that these companies couldn’t possibly have any malintent because the stakes are too high. They have no incentive to reduce costs, improve repairability, or even genuinely care about the patients or symptoms that they’re treating; that’s the inventor’s problem.
It also often involves ignoring us when we say what we need or want out of assistive devices. I’ve seen a lot of amputees write up essays on how artificial limbs are often designed for the wants of able people (cool technology, robotics, how similar it looks to a biological limb, etc), rather than the wants of the people wearing it (lightness, comfort, ease of use, etc). Robotics are heavy, and a lot of the robotic controls are done by flexing muscles in patterns which is inconvenient compared to a grasper hook. Meanwhile able people keep thinking that the goal should be robot strength arms like in a comic book, but a simple force body diagram will show that that just moves the point of discomfort and failure away from the prosthetic and onto the place it attaches to the body.
Designers with OEM parts: If you gotta replace your arm, might as well add a badass super-strong mech suit with guided missiles, just like in the movies.
Person who just wants to eat their soup before it gets cold: …
I expected them to be more than that.
Keep in mind those are probably drop-ship Amazon quality. I’d expect 5x for something actually good that will last.
Yes, it is closer to $17k USD for an actual custom chair that will meet individual needs (which can’t be bought on amazon) instead of a one size fits most kind of thing.
The customization is actually incredibly important for quality of life reasons, because it isn’t just physical measurements, but also things like proper weight distribution tunes to how the person sits in and uses the chair. Sure, you can get a chair for $600, but there is a non zero chance that the throttle will be touchy and the balance will be off, sending you backwards onto the floor every time you move.
My dad got his when it was time. It fit him perfect (absolutely needed a custom chair given his condition), but when he sat in it the joystick was really twitchy. I told him he just needed to be patient and take it in (or demand home service in his case) until they got the settings right, but I think something about it embarrassed him and he didn’t want to use it anymore.
Considering how dystopian this world is I expected them to be more expensive, still expensive tho
the cheapest realistic one for someone who needs an electric wheelchair is 4000, not 200.
and that has neither upper back nor neck support. it does not recline. you will get sores from it.
If you buy something for that price, I hope you have somebody who can come and get you when it fucks up and leaves you in the middle of nowhere.
Hey, OP, can you pass this along to the OP-OP?
It’s an open source cochlear implant hearing aid as in the part that goes on to the actual physical implant.
What’s really fun is we have two ruling parties, both of whom don’t give a damn about right to repair, tech monopolies, or universal health care.
