Shitty robots

A few blogposts ago, I wrote asking why it was that things had to work (link)?  Why is it physiotherapists are obsessed with things working.

Well one of our Critical Physiotherapy comrades read the post and pointed me to the beautiful, poetic and entirely useless work of Simone Giertz and her Shitty Robots.

And then would you believe it, but two days later Simone is being interviewed on our local radio station (listen here).

Simone builds robots that don’t work.  Or rather they work, but don’t do anything useful.  They are the antithesis of all of the supposedly ‘useful’ (and frankly poe-faced and self-righteous) mechanical contraptions now making their way into physiotherapy practice.

No more prosthetic limbs, bodyweight supported treadmill training or the biofeedback devices.  Consider instead the hair washing robot, the toilet paper dispenser, or the chopping machine.

This is surely the future for physiotherapy.

However, there’s a snag.

You see I don’t believe physiotherapists have the wherewithal to come up with their own Shitty Robots.  I think they are too fixated on making things that are practical, ergonomically designed, and, frankly, useful.

So I’m setting the good folk of the Interweb a challenge.  I will give a prize to the person who can come up with the best Shitty Physio Robot, worthy of Simone’s exacting standards.

You don’t have to build it, you just have to come up with the idea.

I’ll post all of the best answers on the blog.  In fact I’m so confident that physiotherapists are so completely lacking in a humerus that I’ll post all of the ideas that pass muster!

Send your ideas via the comments box at the bottom of this page, or post them on Twitter (@CriticalPhysio), Facebook, or send me a good old fashioned email using your new modern convenience bot.