The girl with the robotic arm
21.9.2016
Translation: machine translated
Body parts can be reprinted. 3D printers may just be a gimmick for the average person, but they can bring back a lot of quality of life for people with disabilities.
Tilly Lockey is ten years old and should actually be dead. After contracting a deadly form of the disease meningitis, surviving blood transfusions and the amputation of both hands, she is back in perfect health. The night before both of her daughter's hands were amputated, Tilly's mum wrote on her website that she had promised her daughter that her daughter would get her hands back.
Little did she know that with her new right arm, Tilly would become an internet star, the figurehead of a new generation of bionics and the darling of the internet.
Aware observers have long since noticed the logo between Tilly's ring finger and her little finger. It comes from the game "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided" and the artificial arm is worn by the game hero Adam Jensen. Tilly's arm is the result of a collaboration between the game designers at Eidos Montréal and the English startup Open Bionics.
Video games
Square Enix Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - Day1 Edition
Xbox Series X, Xbox One X, Multilingual
Jensen's arm has some fantastic benefits, including a built-in sword and a stabiliser that improves his aiming accuracy. Of course, Tilly's arm doesn't have to be a weapon - even though the designers at Open Bionics briefly had a taser built into the arm - that can save the world. Her arm simply has to do what a normal human hand does: hold things, press buttons and open doors. Among other things.
Price drop of 95%
"The arm is okay. It looks cool," says Tilly at a panel at San Diego Comic Con last July. The audience at the Open Bionics x Deus Ex panel laughs. The 10-year-old states that the arm feels completely natural and clenches her fist. The whirring of the servo motors can be heard and the girl grins. The simple grip, i.e. the folding of the fingers, has been a standard movement of prostheses since at least the 1950s. But Tilly goes one step further. Two fingers remain extended, the other two touch the thumb and Tilly looks through the hole. A quantum leap in prosthesis technology, because the servos are controlled by the residual muscles in the stump of her arm, which means that controlling individual fingers is precision work. It requires a great deal of sensitivity from the wearer and the most sensitive electronics.
Open Bionics makes prosthetics that look cool, according to Samantha Payne, COO at Open Bionics. "In the past, people who looked different were bullied. Today, you're really cool if you have a robotic arm," she explains. Some people are even jealous of people who wear the modern prostheses.
The English company relies on the possibilities of 3D printing. The prototypes are produced using an Ultimaker 2, which is available to everyone. For the designs, they rely on open source so that anyone with a 3D printer can print and customise prostheses. "As a result, we can produce the prostheses extremely cheaply," says Samantha Payne. In Switzerland, a bionic reconstruction of a lost arm costs over 100,000 francs. An arm from the 3D printer should one day cost less than 4,900 francs.
However, there is still a catch. "Doctors aren't using the technology yet. Neither are hospitals. But the experiments are continuing," says Payne. It will still be a while before it becomes mainstream. "3D printing of prostheses is inevitable," says Tobias Ettlin, orthopaedist at Bellmann Orthopädie GmbH. Although development is still in its infancy and he doubts the material stability of 3D-printed prostheses, he does not want to deny the possibilities and potential of the technology. "Individual parts are already being printed under experimental conditions," he adds.
Fashion accessory, fetish and quality of life
Tilly's arm, just like all the other models from Open Bionics, breaks with the human mould. Where the Swiss prosthesis industry mostly imitates the human form at the customer's request, according to Ettlin, Open Bionics produces arms that deliberately draw attention to themselves. "This sometimes bears quite strange fruit," says Samantha Payne. She receives emails from people who not only have two intact arms, but are also big Deus Ex fans: "In their emails, they ask how they can get hold of such a prosthesis so that they can replace one of their arms with an Open Bionics product." She believes that they were probably joking until now. But as body modifications become more and more extreme - an April joke from the blog BMEZine keeps doing the rounds because it is so credible - sooner or later someone will take the plunge and replace a healthy body part with a cool-looking prosthesis.
Where the control over one's own body and the free determination over it ends is not her problem, she says. She is in no way qualified to answer these questions.
But for Tilly, the arm is a blessing. For her, the arm is both a fashion accessory and an object that makes the world much more accessible to her. For her, the Adam Jensen arm is a tool with which she can conquer the world for herself. Because even though she manages quite well without her hands, she is limited in her everyday life. However, the wearer of the arm doesn't seem to worry about this herself, but instead thinks about the future of prostheses: "In ten years' time, I'll have a wardrobe full of arms, just like clothes," she says. She fantasises aloud that one day she will go shopping online, buy new prostheses on the internet and then choose an arm according to her mood. Tilly also has something to say on the topic of transhumanism, the transcending of biological-human function through technology: "My arm isn't super strong yet. But I'm sure it will be possible in the future."
Header image: Tilly Lockey is 10 years old, cyborg, internet phenomenon and speaker for amputees.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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