Samantha Payne’s Open Bionics turns children with limb differences into superheroes with its robotic hands, inspired by the worlds of Frozen, Star Wars and Iron Man.
“These previously existed in science fiction but today they’re a reality,” Payne told the audience at WIRED Next Generation. “This came out of a love of making and of sharing our work.” Payne’s use of 3D scanning and printing has made it 20 times less expensive to create artificial limbs, giving the world’s two million upper limb amputees the chance to use prosthetic limbs that a couple of years ago would have been prohibitively expensive.
Payne co-founded Open Bionics in 2014. It won a $250,000 (£201,000) cash prize at the finals of Intel's 'Make it Wearable Challenge' for its work developing low-cost bionic hands that look and feel good.
"We’re inspired by technology and trying to replicate anatomy. The human hand is super amazing – we don’t think about it because we use them all the time, but they’re so strong, you can move them so quickly and they tell you so much about the world.”
Payne’s four-person robotics team can build a fully customised bionic arm in just three days while a prosthetic arm from the NHS can take up to three months. But for Payne, three days is still too long, so she’s made her designs open-source and invited the world to print off their own limbs and push her technology to the next level.
While she was working at her Bristol-based lab, Payne received a message from someone she’d never met before – an American veteran who had lost his arm in Afghanistan. “By the way,” he said, “I was researching prosthetic limbs and I downloaded your file and made it myself.”
“When you’re open source you open your technology to millions of other people who want to improve it, you advance it much faster than if their were just four of us in a robotics lab,” she said.
When anyone can download and print off their own bionic arms, it opens up a world of opportunity for personalised prosthetics, Payne said. “Who’s to say what your replacement hand should look like? It’s an expression of yourself.” Traditionally prosthetic hands have been made to imitate human hands, but Payne wants to give children the chance to choose their own limbs. “We want to change children who have limb differences into bionic superheroes.”
One of those superheroes joined her on stage at WIRED Next Generation, 11-year-old Tilly. Tilly was just 15 months old when she had to have her hand amputated after contracting meningitis septicemia. The replacement she was originally fitted with, though, was a world away from hand she needed.
“It was basically a puppet hand, it only had three fingers and it was made of metal. My mum thought it was more of a weapon than a hand,” she said. Now, with a bionic arm from Open Bionics, Tilly can move all of her fingers and perform more complex movements. EMG sensors on her arm detect muscle movement, telling her bionic arm how quickly or firmly to squeeze its fingers.
Payne’s bionic arms are much more than just technical achievements. When a child picks their bionic arm, choosing to become Iron Man, Princess Elsa or Mace Windu, they’re taking control of their own identity. “These prosthetics enable children to do more of the activities their peers can do, but they also make them feel more empowered about what they can do themselves.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
