In Good Hands

This story first appeared in A3's Automated newsletter. Subscribe here. 

At seven, Aadeel Akhtar visited Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, and his parents’ hometown. “That was the first time I met someone missing a limb,” he explains. “She was my age, missing her right leg and using a tree branch as a crutch. And that's what inspired me to want to work in this field in particular, in making limbs for people and now robots.” 

Such journeys are, of course, never so straightforward. Life has its ways of throwing up roadblocks for even the most charmed among us — even those who do manage to devote our adult lives to fulfilling a childhood dream dreamt halfway around the world.  

The story remained with Akhtar, through multiple cross-disciplinary degrees — including  a Ph.D. in Neuroscience an M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering — culminating in his team’s research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  

“The idea would be that I would work at an academic hospital and have my own lab, like an academic lab at the hospital where I'd see patients once a week, people with limb differences. And then the rest of the week, would build devices like this,” Akhtar holds up the latest version of Psyonic’s Ability Hand, during our conversation on this week’s podcast, “where we would test them on potential patients.” 

That trajectory changed during a 2014 trip to Ecuador, where Akhtar and team were introduced to Juan, the first patient to test out an early version of the Ability Hand. The model wasn’t much to look at, measuring roughly 3x the size of the human hand, with an unruly mess of wires and other visible components — but it did the trick.  

“[Juan] told us that he made a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years and that he felt as though a part of him had come back,” Akhtar explains.  

That experience convinced the team to take their efforts commercial. “That’s when I realized that if I stay in academia, this just ends up as a journal paper,” he adds. “And if we want everyone to feel the same way that Juan did, we had to commercialize this tech. And the way my wife puts it is that I went down on that trip as a medical student and I came back as a CEO.” 

Something I likely don’t have to point out to you at this point in the article: Akhtar is a great storyteller. I saw him give a talk over the summer and immediately reported to colleagues that we needed to get him for our upcoming Humanoid event (the source of the featured photo up top) and the then still unnamed podcast.  

The decision between sticking with a technical founder or sourcing an outside executive for the CEO role can be fraught for many early-stage startups. Every so often, however, you come across someone who comfortably dons both hats.  

The other key piece of Psyonic’s foundational story is the tree branch. That bit speaks to something even deeper when discussing healthcare and services — particularly in developing areas like Karachi. Try explaining to a precious seven-year-old the inherent unfairness of not only being born with a limb difference, but also not having access to technologies abundantly available to others. 

Akhtar says conversations around access were another fundamental piece of Psyonic’s “lifeblood” from the outset. 

“A year before we founded the company, we started working with a nonprofit organization called the Range of Motion Project,” he explains. “Their mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them, primarily in Guatemala and Ecuador […] That just really resonated with us that we were building these 3D printed prosthetic hands that were super low cost to build. And we wanted to be able to make these things accessible to as many people as possible.” 

Through its Ability Fund, Psyonic and Range of Motion are working to increase access to the traditionally prohibitively expensive technology.