- [Garrett Anderson] Earlier this year,
is the first time I actually could feel
touching my daughter's hand with this prosthetic hand
because of the sensory feedback.
I was a U.S. Army Infantryman.
I deployed to Iraq with the Illinois National Guard
the 33rd infantry brigade.
On October 15th, 2005
we hit a roadside bomb where it detonated under our vehicle.
It blew the engine out of the truck.
I broke my jaw in seven spots.
I was mild traumatic brain injury.
And I lost my arm below the elbow.
When I got back from Iraq, I got back to normal life.
I got my undergrad. I had two children.
I was a stay at home dad.
Fortunately, I got linked up
with this promising PhD student who had this great idea
for a prosthetic, named Aadeel Akhtar
and his company called PSYONIC.
- This is something that I've wanted to do my entire life
ever since I was seven years old.
My parents are from Pakistan.
I was visiting and that's the first time I met someone
with a limb difference.
She was my age missing her right leg
and using a tree branch as a crutch.
And that's what inspired me to want to go into this field.
At PSYONIC, we develop advanced bionic limbs
that are affordable and accessible to everyone.
We would not have been able to create this hand
unless we had the manufacturing in house
with the Formlabs printers.
And it's really been a game changer for not just
us as a business, but also for the industry as a whole.
Our patients, what they're looking to do is just
do their normal activities of daily living, right?
So, just feeding themselves, tying their shoelaces,
going to the gym and working out.
All of the devices that are out there
You couldn't even do some of those simple tasks.
- It's sort of the small things.
Things that you wouldn't think that you would miss.
It's those things that you take for granted a lot of times.
The ability to know that you have something
in your right hand.
I can actually drive with this on the car and just steer.
I have sensory feedback that tells me how hard I'm gripping,
if I even have something, and if I crush it or not.
- There's no way we could have competed
with other prosthetics companies.
If we had to abide by purely traditional manufacturing.
3D printing, especially the Formlabs 3D printers,
has come in absolutely critical for that development process
for a startup our size.
While some of the 3D printing we do
with SLA printing is for prototypes.
A lot of it is, in fact, for end use product.
This is especially true of the Tough 1500 Resin.
Which is still superior to any other 3D printed item
we could make in terms of strength, resolution,
physical property, thermal resistance, impact resistance.
The Tough 1500 is honestly the best thing we found
and we continue to use it in all our commercial devices.
- Some of the biggest challenges we faced is how
do we make this hand still low cost for us to manufacture
but more durable than anything else that's out there?
Before our hand came along,
what we call a multi-articulated hand
where all the fingers can move individually.
It was only covered by about 10% of insurers in the U.S.
By getting it covered under Medicare,
We've expanded that access to 75% of patients
who can now afford the most
advanced bionic hand in the world.
- [James Austin] We use Clear Resin to mold,
at least one silicone part
primarily the silicone fingers and silicone thumb.
The surface finish needs to be as smooth as possible.
And we found that we get the smoothest surface finish
from running it at the 25 micron resolution size.
With FDM printed molds,
molded items would end up with these odd
striated, striped textures on top.
Once we switched over to using Clear Resin
we are able to obtain a much smoother surface finish
because of the much higher resolution.
- [Aadeel Akhtar] The fact that we can actually manufacture
everything in house has been critical to our operation.
We've innovated a lot of the manufacturing techniques
for making those processes.
- [James Austin] If we didn't have these printers in house,
if we had to go to third party or export them,
it would slow our development
and iteration process dramatically.
The fact that we are able to design a part in CAD,
take it to our printer, print it within a day
and have it come off
means our iterations can move so quickly
and our testing can be rapidly accelerated.
I'm not sure we would've been able to function
if we had to wait a week for parts to come back.
We wouldn't have been able to develop
as fast as we could have.
And we wouldn't have been able to get to where we are today.
So amazing to see people get back part of what they've lost.
And we've had prosthetic patients actually tell us, like
it feels like a part of them has come back to life.
If they're able to do things that they were never able to do
after their amputation.
- They haven't stopped innovating in the technology
and upgrading what needs to be done.
They're trying to figure out
how can we improve what we have?
- [Aadeel Akhtar] Sergeant Anderson has tried basically
every prototype that we've ever made
of the ability hand over the last seven years.
And he has been critical to the design of this,
because if it can survive him,
then we know it can survive anyone.