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In 1980, David Gow was in a well-paying but dull job with a Scottish defense contractor when a BBC television program called Tomorrow’s World changed his life. The show profiled scientists in Sweden who were developing electrically powered artificial limbs, and Gow was riveted. Despite not having known anyone with a prosthesis, his fascination with them dated back to his college days, when he first heard about the limbs’ control systems. He’d been sketching designs for bionic arms and legs ever since, but the program convinced him to make it a profession. “They were showing preschool children born without hands who were hanging from exercise bars,” he recalls. “That was when I absolutely realized that this was what I wanted to do.”
More than a quarter of a century later, Gow, 50, is one of the world’s leading prosthetics builders. His new i-LIMB is the first commercially available hand with five individually powered fingers, which allows wearers to grip oddly shaped objects, from tennis balls to coffee-cup handles. Gow’s first opportunity to work in the field came in 1981 when a government hospital in Scotland advertised for an entry-level engineer to help design prosthetics for its patients with limb defects. Gow won the job and, over the next decade, became an expert in designing powered joints, including shoulders and wrists. He even traveled to Sweden to show off a partial hand with an electric pincer to Rolf Sorbye, one of the scientists featured on the Tomorrow’s World episode that had inspired him. A fully articulating prosthetic hand was the next logical step, but it was a huge technical leap. For years, Gow pursued the tried-and-true strategy of using a centralized motor system to control all the smaller components. But it failed to adequately control the intricate movements he wanted the hand to make, and it was too bulky for children. In the process of shrinking the hand, he had a breakthrough. He divided it into parts—finger, palm, thumb—and equipped each with its own small, independent motor-control system, which reads signals from the muscles in the remaining part of the wearer’s arm. “It’s like a Lego kit,” Gow explains. “You can put together different sizes and lengths of fingers.” The more than a dozen patients who have so far received the i-LIMB attest to the approach’s effectiveness. U.S. Army veteran Juan Arredondo says his new hand feels like a natural extension of his body: “Now I can pick up a Styrofoam cup without crushing it—I can just grab it like a regular person.” From here, Gow hopes to produce hands with even more refined motion. “People like to call the hand ‘bionic,’ but I have another term for it: ‘biolithic,’ ” he says. “What we’re doing is still in the Stone Age compared with what the human body can do.”—ELIZABETH SVOBODA |
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