Seeking to Innovate?

Accelerate your company's innovation capacity
[CONTACT US]

INNOVATION RESOURCES

i-LIMB Hand

Breakthrough:
The world’s first commercially available fully articulated prosthetic hand with independently powered fingers and thumbs.

Inventor:
David Gow, United Kingdom

Financial reward:
$20 million +

The Story:

The i-LIMB Hand is a highly functional bionic hand that took more than 20 years to develop and was invented by a Scottish NHS (National Health Service) employee, David Gow and designed and built by Touch Bionics. The powered prosthetic is a major advance on previous prosthetic hands which are hook-like and have limited flexibility. The joints are fully articulated with an individual motor for each digit, and the hand does not require surgery to be fitted to a patient’s stump.

The i-LIMB Hand has been fitted to hundreds of people including UK and US soldiers who lost limbs fighting in Iraq, and it first went on sale in 2007. And patients can chose from a variety of skin coverings that give the limb an ultra-realistic look.

How it Works

An individual who has a severed arm, or who was born without a hand, will usually have muscles up to the point where the missing part of the limb would have been. The prosthesis is fitted to the stump and two electrodes attach to the muscles. When muscle fibers in the arm contract pulses of electricity travel to the electrodes. A computer in the back of the bionic hand then interprets those signals to initiate and control movement.

A wide array of movements are possible and wearers of the bionic prosthesis can perform a whole range of tasks that cannot be achieved with other hand prosthetics – these include taking hold of narrow objects as well as larger items such as mugs. Typing on keyboards is also possible.

The i-LIMB Hand was designed to be sensitive and not as clumsy as other devices and its thumb can rotate through 90 degrees in the same way that real thumbs can. It is the first prosthetic hand that is capable of imitating the form and function of a real hand.

Development

Gow started working on electronic arms, including shoulders, wrists, and hands in the late 1980s. He wanted to use his engineering knowledge to build something that would have an application for individuals. A partial hand system was developed in 1993 and five years later came the fitting of the world’s first electrically powered shoulder. Feedback from patients has been invaluable as the prosthetics device has undergone several incarnations over the years.

The bionic hand was developed using cutting edge mechanical engineering techniques and it uses DuPont™ Zytel® HTN semi-aromatic polyamide to protect the system of drives and motors and make them impact resistant, but without increasing the required overall weight.

The inventor’s company was the first to be spun out of the Scottish National Health Service and a grant from Scotland’s main economic development agency helped to keep it going in the early years. And after it changed from a public entity to a private body investment funding poured in which allowed more research to go ahead.

To get the prosthetic innovation to mainstream consumers Touch Bionics had to train people to fit it to patients as originally only a limited number of experts were qualified for the task. The company now offers a training course to equip people with the requisite skills.

Top Innovation

In 2008 the i-LIMB Hand was named one of the top 50 innovations of the year by Time Magazine. It came in at number 14 alongside CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and ahead of NASA’s latest Mars Rover.

The bionic hand was followed by bionic fingers and bionic wrists, elbows, and shoulders are in development.

[NEXT STORY]

IdeaConnection: What Can we Innovate for You?

Become a
Paid Problem Solver