YouTube starlet and CBBC actress Kate Mandeville sports a Swarovski-crystal-adorned prosthetic at London’s Wearable Tech Show. Designed and 3D printed by Open Bionics, Mandeville’s bionic arm is a statement in fashion and personality.

The personalisation of healthcare devices has been a growing trend in the maker-sphere. From gold-plated hearing aids, neon walking sticks, and sparkling blade prosthetics to 3D printed arm casts, people with disabilities are no longer waiting for health services to catch up – they are dragging their medical devices into the future on their own.

These medical aids are getting a long-awaited makeover and today it’s the turn of the bionic hand with Open Bionics unveiling of their latest 3Dprinted prosthetic at London’s Wearable Tech Show.

Open Bionics, a startup of four based inside the Bristol Robotic’s Laboratory’s Technology Incubator, has 3D printed a custom-fitted bionic hand with enough sparkle to rival a disco ball for a woman born without a hand.

Grace Mandeville is a YouTube starlet and CBBC actress who applauds the growing popularity for diverse prosthetics.

Grace has taken to YouTube on multiple occasions to discuss diversity and her love of inventive prosthetics that can show off a bit of her vibrant personality.

Grace said: “This is my favourite thing about this whole topic. I really love fashion, and therefor dress to illustrate my personality, so being able to wear a creative prosthetic that shows who I am seems awesome – it’s like a one off accessory that nobody else can wear, basically like vintage Chanel.”

“You should be proud of what makes you different, and I think being able to wear a fun looking prosthetic is something to be proud of! You’re basically saying to the public “my arms cool and I know”.”

Open Bionics’ COO Samantha Payne said that the idea behind the Swarovski hand was to show off the possibilities for prosthetics within 3D printing.

Samantha said: “We printed Grace a socket and robotic hand in three days, and because 3D printing is so affordable we can add Swarovksi crystals and create something really eye-catching that will not break the bank. We also added four fibre optic wires to the socket so that whenever Grace closes her hand, a blue light would shoot up her 3D printed arm.”

“Prosthetics are entering the realms of fashion and we wanted to show how bionic prosthetics can be functional and fun.”

“We’ve been very experimental with Grace’s hand. This is a completely new socket design and this is the first time we’ve experimented with placing the EMG sensors above the elbow. Grace is actually controlling her hand by the muscle signals from her back.”

“The idea is to give hand amputees more option and a choice to have something they’d get some enjoyment out of wearing.”

“We’ve been told a lot by amputees that they want something that will get a compliment not a strange stare, something far away from a ‘flesh’ coloured prosthetic.”

Grace’s sister, Amelia Mandeville, said that having an attractive prosthetic could help turn something that is seen as ‘negative into a positive’. Amelia echoed her sister’s stance for having the option to stand out, asking “Who wants to be the same?”

As Grace eloquently puts it, “Why try to blend in, when you can have a piece of art as an arm instead?”

Grace was given a traditional cosmetic prosthetic when she was little and has one now but says, “I never wear it, I don’t like wearing it, it gets in the way.”

Grace said: “I love what Open Bionics is doing. So many people at the ‘Wearable Tech Show’ thought I had a hand and that I was wearing a fashionable sleeve, making some kind of fashion statement. I had to keep pulling my arm out and showing people that I wasn’t wearing some kind of glove but an actual bionic arm.”

“I found the hand really easy to operate, I tried it on for the first time Monday and I could control the hand straight away. I thought it was going to be really heavy but it wasn’t. I obviously still feel the difference, I was born with a foreshortened forearm so wearing anything is going to feel different and will always be an added weight.”

“I don’t ever wear prosthetics because I don’t feel like I need to. I would however absolutely love a bionic hand like this for events and evening’s out. I love fashion and this looks incredible.”

Open Bionics is still developing their robotic prosthetics and hope to be selling 3D printed hands within a year. They have won multiple awards for their open source 3D printed robotic hands and was recently named as one of the Top 50 international robotics companies to watch along with Google.

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Our 3D-printed prosthetic hand project has made the global finals of Intel’s Make it Wearable competition!  Open Bionics came out of the Open Hand Project, where we developed a 3D printed robotic hand that would cost amputees less than $1,000.

Our idea is to significantly reduce the cost of prosthetic hands by using 3D printing. We wanted to create a sustainable way hand amputees could get affordable prosthetics. So, we submitted a video explaining what we’re trying to achieve and we were selected as finalists!

As finalists we have already won $50k and will compete to win the Make it Wearable competition’s $500k first prize. We also get to fly to the United States for mentoring and training as one of ten projects selected.

Open Bionics is open-source, which means that all of the know-how needed to create a robotic prosthetic hand will eventually be posted on our website. The idea is that potentially anyone can improve and customise the designs themselves, and then upload them for everyone to share.

Our prosthetic hand offers much of the functionality of 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.

We’ve made some great progress in the last few weeks: We’ve got the circuit boards working and controlling the motors, all that needs to be done now is a few more tweaks on the hand design and for the code to be written. I’ve enlisted the help of an embedded software developer that I work with at the BRL so we’ll be working on this over the next few weeks. The aim is to send out our prototype hand before the end of the Make It Wearable competition and receive some useful feedback on its performance.

We’re also working on a mini robot hand called “Adams” that is designed to work on small humanoid robots using a new flexible material that is 3D printed in one piece and requires very little assembly. We plan to scale the Adams hand up soon, so we can create a new hand for children.

We’re currently based in the incubator at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). For more info, visit www.openbionics.com.

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Roboticists and doctors working in Switzerland and Italy have come together to develop a bionic hand that provides sensory feedback in real time, meaning that an amputee can be given back the ability to feel and modify grip like someone with a “real” hand. Using a combination of surgically implanted electrodes (connected at one end to the nervous system, and at the other end to sensors) and an algorithm to convert signals, the team has produced a hand that sends information back to the brain that is so detailed that the wearer could even tell the hardness of objects he was given to hold.

In a paper published in Science Translational Medicine in Feb. 2014, the team from EPFL (Switzerland) and SSSA (Italy) headed by Prof. Micera of EPFL and NCCR-Robotics presented an entirely new type of prosthetic hand, Lifehand 2, that is capable of interfacing with the nervous system of the wearer in order to give the ability to grip and sense like a real hand – including being able to feel shape and hardness of an object. This life-like sensation of feeling is something that has never before been achieved in prosthetics.

Using a combination of the basic concepts from TMR (targeted muscle reinnervation) – a new but increasingly sophisticated technique where nerves are rerouted across the chest and can allow a sense of touch when stimulated with tactile traces – and new robotic techniques, the team has allowed an amputee to feel as though his old hand was back during a series of 700 tests.

In order for the hand to function, a looped sensory feedback mechanism is employed. The first step of this mechanism involves transverse intrafascicular multichannel electrodes (TIMEs) being surgically implanted in the median and ulna nerves in the arm – those that control the sensory fields of the palm and fingers. The electrodes are then connected to a number of sensors distributed across the prosthetic hand in locations that mimic the locations of tendons on a real hand. The signals from the sensors are then relayed to an external unit where they are processed before being passed back to the nerves in a format that allows the brain to understand how much pressure is being exerted on the sensors, much like how information is passed from a real hand to the brain.

Residual muscular signals are then taken from 5 positions on the forearm and are used to decode the intentions of the user, and a power source is used to activate the hand in one of four different grasping motions.

Results of the 700 tests performed during the study were positive, showing that even when the subject was tested under audio and visual deprivation he was able to modify his grip according to what he was holding – so a soft object such as a sponge or an orange was naturally held with a softer grip than a hard object such as a cricket ball. By the end of four weeks of testing, 93% accuracy was recorded for pressure control in the index finger and it was found that the brain automatically assimilated data from multiple sensors in the palm of the hand. The subject was able to distinguish the stiffness of the object within 3 seconds, a response comparable to that of a natural hand, and said “When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square”.

For many years medical scientists have used prosthetics to replace the lost hands of amputees. Over time, these hands have become more and more sophisticated, using materials that are lighter, more flexible and that look more and more realistic. Such prosthetics are considered invaluable by some amputees but do not have a high uptake within the community due to issues with use and comfort – if a prosthetic is heavy, uncomfortable and cannot move like a real hand it might not be practical for everyday life.

While prosthetics is not new, just the idea of a technique that allows sensors, motors and human nerves to communicate so easily with each other in real time would have been unthinkable a few years ago. For this to have now been developed into a method that supports the ability of the brain to assimilate impulses from 2 different areas to allow the subject to feel the neurologically complex action of palm closure is something exceptional.

Another particularly encouraging aspect of the study was the level of success despite it being 8 years since the chosen subject’s hand was amputated. The team were concerned that because of the long timescales involved, the nerves would be too degraded for use. However, the tests indicated that this was not the case, thus opening up the technology to a wide range of potential users.

As with any other science or technology project, the work is still ongoing. Although the functionality of the hand has been demonstrated to be lifelike, the appearance of a hand made of plastics, iron, tendons and electrical circuits is not, so the team is working on creating a sensitive polymer skin to make the appearance of the hand more realistic and more usable in everyday life situations. In a parallel line of work, in order for the hand to be made portable the electronics required for the sensory feedback system must be miniaturized so that they can be implanted into the prosthetic.

The Dextrus hand is a robotic hand that can be put together for well under £650 ($1000) and offers much of the functionality of a human hand. Existing prosthetic hands are magnificent devices, capable of providing a large amount of dexterity using a simple control system. The problem is that they cost somewhere between £7,000-£70,000 ($11,000-$110,000) — far too much for most people to afford, especially in developing countries. Through the Open Hand Project, an open source project with the goal of making robotic prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees, a fully-functional prototype has already been developed. An indiegogo campaign is currently underway to provide funds for refining and testing the design.

In order to broaden the reach of prosthetic devices, I decided to create a low-cost prosthetic hand while in my final year at the University of Plymouth. I ended up creating a fully functioning prototype that went on to win three awards for innovation and excellence.

The Open Hand Project tackles a number of problems to bring the cost down. One of these is the customized nature of prosthetic devices. Usually they need to be custom-fitted to the user’s remaining arm, which can rack up medical bills with consultations and fittings. The Dextrus hand connects directly to an NHS fitted, passive prosthesis. This means no additional custom fitting and no extra cost.