The loop itself is connected to another identical arrangement located on the other side of the brace by a wire hidden in one of the straps that holds them together.īoth inside and out, the Control Unit is much closer to what I was expecting from a medical device. Taking a close look at the four pin connector that goes into the back of the control unit, we can see that the wires have actually been twisted together and crimped to both conductors in the yellow cable. I would have thought they’d use some kind of flexible loom to hold the wires in place, but apparently the foam of the brace itself was considered enough to keep the wires flat. It’s not even like they made a neat coil pulling the rest off the foam off, there are areas where the wires overlap a bit. It’s just a dozen or so loops of two conductor insulated wire that’s held together with, as far as I can tell, painter’s masking tape. As it turns out, there isn’t.Ĭutting the foam lining away from the brace in an operation not entirely unlike gutting a fish, we can see there’s nothing very special going on here. But being a high-tech medical device, you might imagine there’s some exotic materials or techniques involved. Since the SpinalStim is designed to produce an electromagnetic field around the spine, it’s not hard to guess that the foam-covered “back brace” contains some kind of coil. But that doesn’t mean the effort was fruitless, and there may yet be hope for hacking these devices should anyone feel like taking up the challenge. This provided a somewhat rare opportunity to observe the device before it deactivated itself, which I’d hoped would let me take a closer look at how it actually operated.Īs you’ll soon see, things unfortunately didn’t work out that way. The Orthofix SpinalStim you’re seeing here was given to me by a friend after their doctor said the therapy could be cut short. The cynic would say the only reason these devices have an expiration date on them is because the manufacturer wants to keep them from hitting the second hand market, but such a debate is perhaps outside the scope of these pages. As you might imagine, there’s no technical reason this has to be the case. Once you’ve “used up” the bone stimulator, it’s functionally worthless. When you receive one of these devices, it will be programmed to only operate for a certain amount of time or number of sessions. That’s not to say there isn’t a debate about how effective they actually are, but studies haven’t shown any downsides to the therapy, so it’s worth trying at least. These wearable devices produce a pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) around the bone, which has been shown to speed up the natural healing process in a statistically significant number of patients. If you’ve ever had a particularly nasty fracture, your doctor may have prescribed the use of an electronic bone growth stimulator.
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