10 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
10 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
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title: "Frank's Hospital Workshop"
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The growing intimacy between technology and the body requires extending the ethics of care to objects. Yet, maintaining and repairing such technologies is often difficult, lengthy and costly for users due to manufacturers’ desire to maintain control over the products. The data provided by the World Health Organization is discouraging: in some countries, 50% of medical machinery is unusable at any given time; in some cases, this figure is as high as 80%.
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Alongside organized legal battles for the right to repair (such as the one carried forward by the Repair Association in the United States), some technicians have chosen to react to the situation with bottom-up initiatives. This is the case with Mike, the retired biomedical technician who runs The Electric Squirrel site, which is dedicated to the maintenance of the most common technical equipment in use across the southern hemisphere.
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It also applies to Frank Weithoener, another technician specializing in biomedical machinery, based in Tanzania. Frank, who has worked as an instructor and consultant in several so-called “developing” countries, claims to have opened his site because he was tired of meeting absurd obstacles to repair everywhere he went. On his website Frank’s Hospital Workshop, he collects and publishes all the maintenance and technical documentation manuals he can get his hands on, as well as providing his own tutorials. As expected, manufacturing companies such as Weyer, General Electric and others regularly threaten to sue Frank, telling him to take the manuals offline. But fortunately, he has thus far resisted the pressure and continued in his mission: to take care of the machines we need to cure ourselves.
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