Hand to Hand 2.0
Most prosthetic arms are designed to give their owners the chance of a “normal existence”. But Open Bionics, a revolutionary 3D-printed prosthetics company that wants to use their “better than normal“ designs to turn disabilities into superpowers.
When Tilly Lockey was 15 months old, she was diagnosed with meningococcal septicaemia strain B — an often-fatal form of meningitis. While doctors near her home in the United Kingdom managed to save her life, they couldn’t save her hands. As a toddler she learned to adapt to life without them, then as time went on, using a range of different prostheses.
Prosthetic limbs have been around almost as long as humans have. Through illness, accident or bad luck, there’s been a need for prosthetic arms, legs, feet and hands for millennia. The oldest known example is a wooden big toe, discovered strapped to a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy’s foot in a tomb at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, on the arid west bank at Thebes. The device is surprisingly advanced: its carved toenail and rounded bottom would have helped the wearer maintain their balance. But it was simply an appendage, without any functionality. And that was the full extent of prosthetics, in a state of near-stasis, for thousands of years.
War became a key driver for many of the more recent innovations in prosthetics: 40,000 British servicemen lost limbs in the First World War, and so Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, which opened its doors in 1939, became an engine for prosthetics in Britain during and in the aftermath of the second global conflict. Rather than simply looking passable, the limbs developed here had a purpose: to be useful and restore some function to those who were “limb different” (meaning they had an amputation of some sort). But the technology was — and until recently still remained — in its infancy.
Standard prosthetics are often bulky, heavy and visually unappealing, falling into a flesh-coloured uncanny valley. They’re also expensive — one child-sized hand cost the Lockey family £36,000. Rather than being something that helps limb different people improve their mobility, such limbs can be a mill stone, singling them out as being not quite the same as everyone else.
A team of 17 engineers, designers, coders and biomedical experts based in three boxy offices in a sprawling start-up accelerator space at the University of the West of England, Bristol, decided to celebrate their difference rather than try and mimic real skin and real limbs. The company — Open Bionics — develops comparatively affordable (around £8,000 to £9,000) assistive devices that sit at the cutting edge of technology, pushing the boundaries of what people with limb difference can really do — and most importantly, look nothing like the run-of-the-mill prostheses you’re imagining.
Open Bionics has a traditional, pinky-brown prosthetic limb in its offices, which sits in stark contrast to their new sleek, lightweight, consciously different design. They recently made their 100th “Hero Arm” and have nearly 30 customers dotted around the country, with a first fitting planned abroad — in Spain — in November. The company will be expanding into Europe and the United States in 2019, heralding a new era for prostheses.
“Within the industry there’s been a revolution,” says Adam Dowdeswell, Open Bionics’ product manager. “As technology has progressed and developed, what’s important to a user has come to the forefront. Rather than just: ‘Let’s try and replicate something’, there’s been a movement in the consideration of mental health over the last few decades.”
While the improved physical movement the arm provides is the most obvious visual result, Joel Gibbard, co-founder of the company, explains that there’s a bigger impact that can’t be seen. “We usually hear it from the parents,” he says, settling down to a meeting with staff. “It has more of a psychological impact than we expected. People feel more confident.”
Joel started tinkering with robotic hands at the age of 17, a decade after his first dalliance with engineering: making a robot to do the cleaning chores his parents had set him. His final-year university degree project was to build a 3D-printed robotic hand — a challenge his lecturers said wouldn’t be possible. He established Open Bionics with co-founder Samantha Payne in 2014. In the years since Joel first began building his robotic hand, attitudes towards limb difference have changed almost as rapidly as the technology underpinning it. We’ve had successive Paralympics, kickstarted by the welcome London gave the world’s best athletes in 2012. Prince Harry’s Invictus Games actually took place the same year that Open Bionics was founded.
“Prince Harry’s Invictus Games actually took place the same year that Open Bionics was founded.”
Ever increasing abilities and feats by competitors in subsequent Paralympics have helped to combat the perceived wisdom that limb difference is a disability. And Open Bionics don’t like using the term at all.
“I don’t like using disability because I don’t think the limb differences we work with are,” explains Adam. “The way we see the world going is a future where human augmentation isn’t something to be scared of,” says a member of the Open Bionics team.
In a time when many of us are buying wearable tech and companies are looking for ways to reduce injuries and improve performance by equipping workers with exoskeletons; what’s a robotic arm between friends?
“People’s perceptions about limb difference have changed and are still changing,” says Adam. “Some people want to mimic the skin colour and have it not be an obvious thing, but some people say: ‘No, I’m proud. This is different, it looks cool. It expresses me.’ To have that choice has proven quite important to people.”
Case in point: Tilly Lockey, now 13, who wears her two Hero Arms with pride. She has her signature written in a rolling cursive script on each arm. Wearing a ‘Girls Rock’ T-shirt she looks like Iron Man.
“For her, it’s a fashion statement and a confidence thing,” says Adam. “People come up to her and say: ‘Oh my god, your arms — I want them.’”
Tilly is not alone: around two million people in the United States are limb different, with the number expected to double by 2050. In the United Kingdom, 8,500 amputation surgeries are carried out every year, a number that has increased significantly in recent years. There are no reliable statistics for the current number of limb different people in the country since the National Amputee Statistical Database, which had tracked numbers in the UK, closed in 2010. It was replaced by a project tied to the University of Salford, Manchester, which has not reported numbers since 2012.
Everyone with limb differences has a unique story about how they came to rely on prostheses, but they all want to be recognised for who they are and what they have, rather than who they aren’t and what they lack.
The Open Bionics offices are in a state of flux, undergoing significant work to streamline the production process, with boxes in odd places and newly printed labels slapped onto desks to denote their future purpose. Ad hoc meetings are held at a small, circular table in the corner of the main open plan office, just a few yards from a foosball table whose players have the 3D-printed heads of a corresponding employee — plus a few customers. It is an office where everyone seems to be constantly moving and working.
As are the 3D printers. In the corner of one office is a bank of 10 3D printers, whirring and beeping like the background of a sci-fi movie, spewing out parts for Open Bionics’ Hero Arm. Each of the printers has been christened by the engineer who built it, which is daubed on a nearby whiteboard. There’s R2-D2, C-3PO and BB-8 — named after the Star Wars droids — and EVE, after the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator in WALL-E. There’s also Matilda, named by Steve Wood, a mechanical engineer at Open Bionics who competed in the seventh series of Robot Wars with Gyrobot.
And lying on a worktop, surrounded by gadgets and gizmos, is Dan Melville’s right arm. Just as you’d take your car in for a regular service, Dan’s arm — among the first the company designed back in 2014 — needed a wrist replacement.
Open Bionics’ Hero Arms are made using 3D-printed components, motors and other tiny elements. Despite cramming massive amounts of hardware and software into the arms, they’re light. “Weight is super important,” says applications engineer Leigh Warren as he scrapes then snaps individual 3D-printed elements from a massive block fresh from the printer. “The hands are usually around 350g, depending on the size. Then the arms differ too, but it’s usually about 700g in total.”
“The problem is that a limb different person might not be used to the weight of a prosthetic arm,” continues Paula Maddox, senior electronics engineer at Open Bionics. “They’re used to a third of the weight of the arm, so getting used to the full weight again can take some time.” However, “we’ve seen children pick it up, and within five or 10 minutes they’re used to it,” she adds. “It’s incredible.”
Every arm is custom-made in the Bristol office, based on a plaster cast taken by a prosthetist at a prosthetic clinic, passing through almost the entire company’s hands before being shipped out to customers.
What the Hero Arm offers wearers is a range of movements rarely seen in the world of prostheses. While it’s not a one-to-one replica of the movement and ability of a human hand, it’s closer than bulky carbon fibre or metal prongs can provide. The arm is powered by three or four motors, depending on the size of the hand attachment, located roughly in line with and parallel to each finger. The motors — attached to a printed circuit board (PCB), and capped with infrared encoders and receivers, masked by spinning, fan-like devices that chop up an infrared beam’s signal to help the PCB decipher where each finger is at any one point — power nuts to which two individual millimetre-thick nylon “tendons” are strung, reaching out from the centre of the hand to each finger.
Further up the plastic 3D-printed sleeve enclosing the remaining limb, there are sensors no bigger than the head of a drawing pin that are triggered by the contraction of muscles. The sensors pick up on the electromyographic signals the muscles generate and feed them down to the PCB, where they’re translated into different movements of the fingers, providing preprogrammed grips that replicate the most useful ways we use our fingers and hands.
And things are always changing at Open Bionics. Dan Melville is the company’s guinea pig, the one willing to test out new iterations of software and hardware. His Hero Arm, currently in for a quick tune-up on the wrist, is fitted with a thumb made from a harder, lighter coloured plastic whose points of articulation are far more ratchet-like than the current design. “It’s been based on feedback that the hold on it is a bit springy, whereas this is more defined,” says Adam.
In the main office space, where staff beaver away in front of massive computer screens, software engineer Olly McBride is tinkering further. “We’re constantly developing new things,” he says, scrolling through the roughly 30,000 lines of code that powers the hand alone. Olly is currently working on a new feature Open Bionics is keen to roll out to users after feedback: the ability to freeze the hand in one position easily.
“It was requested by one of our ambassadors,” explains Olly. “If he’s holding a pint at a gig, he doesn’t want to be consciously thinking about tensing his muscles and not dropping the drink.” It’s a common concern among Hero Arm wearers: Tilly has a similar issue when playing on the Nintendo Wii at home. “She used to turn the hand off to freeze it in place,” says Olly.
Along one glassed wall of the offices where the Open Bionics team do most of their work, there’s a boxy white shelving unit. It’s adorned with trinkets and mementoes of this ground-breaking company’s young life. In the middle of the shelves, alongside the original, clunky hand that Joel Gibbard first designed all those years ago is a small section housing two colourful printed comic book covers — one red, one blue.
Front and centre on both covers is a cartoon depiction of Tilly, one pouting, one beaming while brandishing her Hero Arm. One cover is titled “Captain America and The Incredible Tilly”, while the other is altogether more straightforward. It reads “The Bionic Woman”. As far as Open Bionics are concerned, Tilly is superhuman.
Words: Chris Stokel-Walker, freelance journalist
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