Why would a bug like that not lead to an instant communication to halt all use of the devices until a patch could be distributed ?
Good thing the couch wasn't driven by a worm-wheel or there would have been no way to pull that person out.
An emergency switch should be independent of software anyway, that's the norm in machining tools, the 'e-stop' circuitry has to be set up according to very specific rules to be approved, you'd expect more stringent controls on hospital equipment.
Good advice. Essential for things that cut you or shoot radiation at you.
It would also be nice if consumer electronics devices did this. I remember badly reflashing my iPod once; the reflash locked up and the iPod was stuck displaying a message without the backlight on. There was no way to reboot it without waiting for the battery to drain itself (or to open the device up). This took a few days, but I did get it working again.
A simple hardware reset switch would have saved me a lot of time. I don't buy Apple products anymore.
In this case the US regulatory agency, NRC, initiated an investigation and forced Elekta to fix it. It sounds like they assumed it wasn't critical enough from the initial report that all treatments with this model should stop before the patch was distributed (the incident happened months ago).