(inspirational music)
- If you go into this just thinking about technology
you're not gonna hit it.
There's this whole other human element, which is
what the technology actually is helping.
And every person is a little bit different, but they
have these kind of overlying similarities.
It's actually being able to stand up on your own
and hug someone, being able to feed yourself,
it's part of the person at that point.
(instrumental music)
I was a kid that took apart everything I got when
I was little, I was always curious
about how things work.
In the eighth grade, my science fair project
was an animatronic robotic hand.
Surprisingly, this does have a good amount of strength.
The fingers were electrical tubing, fishing line
as the tendons, simple little server motors
from R.C. airplanes.
After I made the first prototype, I entered that
into the science fair.
People wanted to see it move, people wanted to see
it work, they wanted to touch it, they wanted
to feel it.
It was something that they could relate to.
After that science fair, I went back to the drawing
board and I saw a hundred different ways that I could make
it better.
I could add an opposable thumb, I could add individual
finger joints.
And now let's try picking something up.
I went through the whole science fair process
again, right, but I notice a small girl come up
and she was spreading the fingers, she was looking
at how every little thing worked.
She was so focused on some of the small details,
that no other kid would even think about looking at.
And I realized that she was missing her right arm.
It turns out that she was actually seven years old,
she had a very, very simple prosthetic.
It was from the elbow to the fingertip, it had
one motion, open, close, it was kind of like
a human-like claw.
And when I was talking to her parents, it turns out
the whole process of the actual prosthetic cost
through the insurance companies, through the actual
fitting process and tweaking, cost about $80,000.
My main goal for the arm was to make it under $1,000
and I achieved that goal.
It changed everything I was doing.
It changed my whole though process from that moment on,
for the rest of my life.
So, I was featured in Popular Science magazine,
and they covered the first full robotic arm I built,
so it was a 3-D printed hand, and a windshield wiper
motor for the elbow, and then kind of pieced together
aluminum bits, and someone on the Robonaut team
at Johnson Space Center at NASA saw this article
and reached out to me, and pretty much asked what
I was doing over the summer.
And, you know, if NASA calls you and asks you
what you're doing over the summer, you're not
doing anything over the summer.
When I got there, the reality was you had three people
watching over your shoulder, that recorded every
little bolt that you loosen.
I would literally go home from NASA and work on my
projects well into the nights, and then,
I felt like I was helping someone else's dream come true.
(inspirational music)
You know, with all these things happening, it gave me
the perspective where, if I want to do what I like,
and I'm very lucky that I know what I like,
I need to go out and do it on my own.
My goal is to not have a lot of money within this,
it's to get this technology to people who need it.
(dramatic instrumental music)
So I'm gonna design each individual piece of the finger,
and I'm gonna start off with a basic sketch that
I'm gonna build from.
Then, right from here, I would actually save this
as a file that the 3-D printer can just print.
Probably 20, 30 minutes later, then have each joint,
then I would assemble that and see if this design works.
If it doesn't, I would repeat this process until it does.
If it does work, then I start assembling the rest of
the hand, end up printing the rest of the fingers,
putting everything together, adding all the actuators,
electronics, and making the full hand.
About six months ago, I was approached by a nonprofit
in Florida.
They said that they've been working with a small girl
named Momo, she's about nine years old.
She's missing her right arm from her elbow
to her fingertip.
And she's been struggling to find prosthetics that
actually work for her.
It's so hard for a kid to have a prosthetic.
3-D scanning is an obvious, obvious way to be
able to make this better.
If you can scan someone's residual limb and then be
able to replicate a negative from that, you can then
expedite this process tremendously.
You can take a new scan and update things.
It's a scalable solution at that point.
Imagine the small girl that receives this prosthetic.
How is that gonna change her life?
How is that gonna change her parents' life?
Everything has been building up to this point,
and we are so close to being able to do it for
one person, then two people, then a hundred people.
We're so close, we're right there.
(inspirational music)
At least six years.
One hundred percent.