- Luke Skywalker gets his arm cut of and he,
you don't even notice it's a fake hand.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- [Steve] Is that gonna happen ever?
- We are very close, actually.
- I'm Steve Kovach with Business Insider,
here with Easton LaChapelle,
the CEO of advanced prosthetics company, Unlimited Tomorrow.
The last time I saw your prototype,
it looked kind of like this Terminator thing.
What has changed in the last year or so?
- [Easton] There's been so many advances in 3D printing,
electronics, and even software.
It just helped really form this really intuitive,
natural product for us.
You can do a lot of different movements with this
and this is designed for a child.
There's a very fine line to balance
between giving them full control
and having everything attached to motors
or having something that is manually actuated,
such as the thumb.
So you can click that into place.
We have sensors that actually monitor the position of that.
We've also found that this is more intuitive
and easier to learn.
- So how does the wearer control it?
- We've developed new advanced muscle sensors.
And so we collect a tremendous amount of data.
And that's really where artificial intelligence,
machine learning, neural networks, come into play,
where we can take all this raw data,
which, to a human, would be extremely hard to filter
and look at it and translate that into something meaningful.
With AI, we can do that automatically.
We actually track the amount of force
that the hand is exerting on an object
and we relay that and communicate that
through haptics over vibrations.
- So the wearer is feeling something happening?
- Yeah, and by doing that we create
feedback loops to the mind.
And that allows easier use and it starts
becoming second nature, actually.
And we can turn something that would take months to learn
down into a couple minutes or hours.
- And how's that compare to sensors, or prosthetics today?
So I know if someone wants a prosthetic today,
they have to go in, they have to get measured.
It seems like you guys have kind of cut that out, right?
- Yeah, and that was a big part.
You know, again, our goal is to get this
to as many people as possible.
And we see a lot of resistance with this current
kind of business model and process,
where prosthetic manufacturers upcharge
and sell to these prosthetic offices
and there's a tremendous amount of custom work.
So it's all, you know, taking plaster molds and casts
and it can take months to make the socket.
So we're using new digital and software means
to be able to automate that and make it really fast
down into a couple days, versus a couple months.
What's really special about Unlimited Tomorrow is
we created a scalable processes with this.
So we deploy 3D scanners, which are low cost, to amputees.
So say if they're missing their right arm,
we actually scan both the right arm and the left arm.
And we use this data to create a mirror image,
a proportional custom device for each person.
We can go from raw 3D scan to customized proportional device
instantly, which is huge.
- How far away are we from a future where
these are almost indistinguishable from regular human limbs?
Or like, you know, Luke Skywalker gets his arm cut off
and he, you don't even notice it's a fake hand.
- We are very close, actually.
We can actually build up skin that mimics the human body.
The scan data that we get from a person
is essentially a 3D image of their arm and their hand.
And so we can print, you know, certain blemishes
and freckles and hairs and pretty much take this image
and print it over this.
- Your business model is very different
than a typical startup.
I imagine you could go knock on VC stores
and get gazillions of dollars in funding right away
if you wanted to.
You're doing something different, you're crowdfunding
and giving people who help crowdfund equity.
Talk a little bit about that.
- Today we're doing this, we're raising money in a,
kind of this new model, which is equity crowdfunding.
We turn to the people.
So essentially, unaccredited investors
and accredited investors can now invest
into Unlimited Tomorrow.
Already, within a couple weeks,
we've raised about $350,000 and it's growing very fast.
- And then what's next?
Where are we gonna be a year from now?
- About seven months ago, Unlimited Tomorrow hit
a huge milestone, which is putting this on
a 10-year-old girl named Momo.
And that was with the help of Microsoft.
Now we're looking at the next 100, and thousands,
and, you know, really scaling this all over the world.
And so we're starting to partner with
some very large companies around the world
to help us, both the technology side and the business side,
to be able to accommodate that.
Later this year we're launching the Indiegogo campaign
to help raise more funds to be able to really
push these first units out into the world
and really start creating change.
(upbeat music)