Why we built a bionics company

Our journey to #RedefineHuman started with a seven year old boy’s dream to improve the lives of people with limb differences. Learn the story behind PSYONIC and how our founder and CEO, Aadeel Akhtar was inspired to build a revolutionary bionics company that would make the best prosthetic technologies available and accessible to anyone who needs them.

Video Transcript:

I'm Aadeel Aakhtar, and I built a bionic hand company. We call it PSYONIC. We build advanced bionic limbs that are affordable and accessible for everyone. 

The whole thing started when I was seven years old. My parents are from Pakistan and I was visiting. And that's the first time I met someone with a limb difference. She was my age, living in poverty, missing her right leg, and using a broken tree branch as a crutch. That's what inspired me to want to go into this field and develop these advanced bionic limbs that would be affordable and accessible to others around the entire world.

In the summer of 2014, as I was doing my PhD, we got the chance of a lifetime to go down to Quito, Ecuador, and work with a patient named Juan Suquillo, who lost his left hand 35 years prior due to a border war between Ecuador and Peru. 

You have to imagine the prototype of the Ability Hand at that time was three times the size of a normal human hand, and had wires going everywhere, plugged into the breadboards, plugged into power supplies, plugged into the wall. Despite that, Juan said in front of international news stations, that a part of him had come back. He was able to make a pinch for the first time in 35 years. And that's when we realized if we want everyone to feel the exact same way that Juan did, the only way we could do that was to commercialize our technology.

And that's when PSYONIC was born. Back in the US, we met retired US Army Sergeant Garrett Anderson, who used a hook on a daily basis. This is technology that hasn't changed since the Civil War era of the United States. We believe that our veterans deserve better. So we upgraded Garrett to the 21st Century. Now he has superhuman abilities. He can rotate his wrist in 360 degrees. He can even charge his phone from his arm. But what we built was just a prototype. We needed to make a prosthetic hand that would survive whatever life threw at you. 

Tina wants to be able to feed her granddaughter. Garrett wants to be able to do work out in his yard. Cody wants to return back to the farm. This requires a hand that is robust to impact, that can feel, that's water resistant, and is also lightweight and very strong. And we built the Ability Hand to be just that. 

To give users the best experience, we developed the Ability Hand to be the fastest bionic hand in the world. It closes faster than the blink of an eye. It's also the first to give users touch feedback. So when Sergeant Anderson holds his daughter's hand, he can actually feel it. And so over the last six to seven years, we've gone through eight different prototypes and feel tested all of them. 

I'm so excited to show you the next generation of the Ability Hand. And here it is—the brand-new Ability Hand. 

You can control it with your muscles, but it also has Bluetooth on it. So there's an app for it on both Android and iOS. And so all five fingers flex and extend and the thumb rotates as well. And you can do different grips with it. So here's a key grip, or if you want to give someone a thumbs up, you can do individual finger moves–so here's a precision pinch. You can do a tripod grasp. If you're at a rock concert, you can rock on. You can also do individual finger pointing and yes, you can point with other fingers too. The fingers are made from a flexible silicon and rubber, so they can take a beating.

It's also made of lightweight carbon fiber to make it super light and super strong. It's USBC rechargeable, so the same way you plug in your phone, you can plug in your arm. In fact, you can charge your phone from your arm as well—a superhuman ability we like to give our users. In the index finger of the pinky and the thumb, we have touch sensors that relate to a vibration motor that's in the socket, so our users know when they've grabbed an object, how hard they've grabbed an object, and when they've let go. 

The best part though, is that it's actually covered by Medicare in the US. We have expanded access to advanced bionic limbs from 10% of people who could afford it to 75% of the US population.

This technology is no longer a prototype. In fact, you won't even believe what you'll be able to do with this Ability Hand and what you're going to be seeing us do over the next couple of months. 

We are redefining what it means to be human for so many individuals across the US and across the world. 

Come join our bionic revolution!