Introducing "Robohand": A Cheap and Effective Alternative for Children with Hand Disabilities

Richard Van As (left) and Ivan Owen (right) tinkering away (photo credit: DigitalTrends.com)What happens when a South African carpenter with a mangled hand meets a special effects artist and puppeteer from Bellingham, Washington? Well, in Richard Van As and Ivan Owen’s case, their chance meeting via YouTube has led to over 100 children with hand disabilities receiving an affordable and effective mechanical hand.

The two first teamed up, initially collaborating on Skype, to create a prototype to help Van As after a rogue table saw in his home workshop destroyed several fingers on his right hand. Owen was in a unique position to help as he had previously built a puppet hand with tendon-like steel cables allowing for dexterity and bending. While finalizing their first prototype, Van As got a call from a mother looking for the same thing to help her 5-year-old son Liam who had been born with no fingers on his right hand. The two immediately got to work. As Owen describes Liam’s first trial with his new hand, “He bent his wrist and made the fingers curl. You could see the light bulbs go off and he looked up and said, ‘It copies me.’ It was really an incredible moment.” And so “Robohand” was born.

Van As and Owen’s Robohand allows anyone to download the design and make a hand with no more than a 3-D printer and around $150 in parts. As hand prostheses can cost thousands of dollars and since there aren’t even that many options available for children, Robohand is certainly a welcomed creation. 12-year-old Leon McCarthy can certainly attest to the awesomeness of Robohand; after using his for the first time he exclaimed, “Look, it’s working, the Frankenstein hand is functioning! I am holding my lunch bag.”

To learn more about Robohand and the story behind it, check out the below link for Steve Henn and Cindy Carpien’s article on NPR: 

NPR: “3-D Printer Brings Dexterity to Children with No Fingers.”

Also, check out Liam and his Robohand in action below!

New Technology Gives those without Speech the Gift of Their Own Voice

Samantha Grimaldo shown above courtesy of NPRSamantha Grimaldo, born with a rare disorder called Perisylvian syndrome, lost her ability to speak and has always needed to carry a machine to do the talking for her. She types in what she wants to say and the device repeats those words out loud. Even though the voice device nowadays is much smaller and portable, Samantha doesn’t like the sound of the voice that speaks for her. “Because it’s weird and older. I don’t want people to hear,” says 17-year-old Samantha.

Fortunately, Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University, is on a mission to individualize voices for the speaking device. She has asked kids with speech disorders to come into her lab and make a throaty “ahhhhh” sound. She records the sound, runs it through the computer and analyzes its inherent characteristics. “We can determine their pitch, the loudness, the breathiness of their voice, and the changes in clarity,” Patel says. Rupal Patel, Speech Scientist at Northeastern University, shown above (photo from NPR) Next, she takes the recording of a similar voice and combines it with the pitch, breathiness and other determined characteristics to create a unique voice for each individual. Samantha is one of the first to experience this new technology and it turns out that her voice is clear, light, and definitely one of a young girl her age.

Check out the following link to read or listen to this story as reported on National Public Radio News: "New Voices for the Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets an Upgrade," by Alex Spiegel