Articles
Why did you want to become an engineer?
Many kids think engineering sounds boring. I didn’t. I loved it. I really enjoyed playing with Meccano and Lego, using it to make stuff. That’s what engineering is all about, as far as I’m concerned. So it was a natural choice for me to want to become an engineer.
Where did you study?
I went to Plymouth University to study robotics. It was a really hands-on course, and that was very important to me. The course was crammed full of project-based learning. I remember using Lego Mindstorms to create robots that could navigate their way around a preset course in the most efficient manner. It was the application of maths, programming and hardware. It was fun and competitive.
When did you first come up with the concept of a 3D printed artificial limb?
It was the basis of my final-year project at Plymouth. That was when I came up with the first working prototype. I started playing around with realistic artificial hands and then wanted to do a more advanced one.
How is the product different from what’s already out there?
The Open Hand Project aims to make advanced prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees. The Dextrus hand is the realisation of this goal. It’s a low-cost robotic hand that offers much of the functionality of a human hand.
Ultimately, these hands will be sold for under $1,000.
The project is open-source, which means all of the plans to make a robotic hand will be published online with no patents. Anyone has the right to make their own and even sell it themselves. After that, companies will be able to use the designs and sell the hands all over the world. This really helps get these devices out to developing countries and places where import taxes might otherwise increase the cost of distribution.
Grip on research: Gibbard started work on the hand while still at university
How does the hand work?
The Dextrus hand works much like a human hand. It uses electric motors instead of muscles, and steel cables instead of tendons. 3D printed plastic parts work like bones and a rubber coating acts as the skin. All of these parts are controlled by electronics to give it a natural movement that can handle all sorts of different objects.
The hand can be connected to an existing prosthesis using a standard connector to give an amputee another option. It uses stick-on electrodes to read signals from
their remaining muscles, which can control the hand, telling it to open
or close. The fingers are individually powered and each one can sense when an object is impeding its movement.
This gives it the ability to grasp objects gently and means the fingers can really wrap around unusual shapes to grip them firmly.
What were the challenges of the development process?
There have been lots of challenges. The project has been the merging of mechanical, electrical and software engineering. And, once the product started to come together, there were issues of medical regulation to overcome. Now I am looking at aesthetics. The hand may work well, but it has to interface with the person in a comfortable manner. It has to fit perfectly. And all the sensors fitted have to pick up and interpret a lot of data. So it is a challenge.
How did you fund the artificial hand in the early stages?
I went down quite a novel route – crowd-funding, through the Indiegogo website. And I was delighted to recently win a £125,000 prize from Intel which will help take the hand towards commercialisation.
The electronics are still essentially in prototype form. They are too big. They need to be miniaturised, and the money from Intel will allow me to outsource that. There also needs to be more design iterations, with more of a focus on the entire device. Up until now it has been more about the hand – but it needs better integration with the user and there needs to be more work on aesthetics.
When do you think you will have a marketable product?
The hand will be ready by early next year for the research industry. Looking further forward, there should be a sellable product available by the end of 2015.
And what impact do you expect the hand to have on the prosthetics sector?
We want it to be made using low-cost 3D printers. The whole project has been about the democratisation of this type of technology, making it cheaper and more accessible to a greater number of people.