Some other recent HN article did an interesting presentation on the reason so many Infomercials for products seem so weird is that the only way to sell some of these products designed specifically to help the differently enabled have to be sold as if they were for particularly lazy fully capable humans. In order to try to get the product to market at all, they have to market to the weird/lazy/strange mainstream target market you see in Infomercial pitches, and often you miss that little bit of "originally built to help my elderly friends or invented to help someone after a stroke".