San Diego’s Bionics Revolution

The dream is a piano duet.

Picture it: a person with a limb difference and a humanoid robot sitting side-by-side; both utilizing the same type of revolutionary bionic hands to play; each moving their fingers individually; striking keys in rhythm with dexterity, speed, and intention. Maybe Mozart’s dizzying Sonata in D. Or Hoagey Charmichael’s playful, four-handed “Heart and Soul.” That’s the end of the rainbow, and it may not be too far away, thanks to the work San Diego’s Psyonic is pioneering in the field of advanced prosthetics.

“I absolutely know it’s going to happen,” says Dale DiMassi, Psyonic’s creative marketing manager and a user of the company’s futuristic appendage, the Ability Hand. “The technology is there. It’s just putting the right pieces together, packaging it the right way.”

The robot would need to be programmed, of course, but the goal is that, in the near future, humans with limb differences that might benefit from the use of advanced hand prosthetics could be making music or typing on keyboards or playing video games with a kind of spontaneous fluency, free from pre-programmed movements and grips of current technology—moving each finger at will—something that the world has never seen before outside of science fiction and comic books. But reality could soon be catching up to imagination.

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Courtesy of Psyonic
The Ability Hand has seen many iterations over the years.

When you meet Dimassi, the bionic hand you shake is fast, strong, and tough—all things prosthetics users look for but have long been left wanting in combination. With it, DiMassi deftly squeezes your hand an appropriate amount, then quickly lets go. It’s an act both impressive and wholly unremarkable—which is the entire point of the Ability Hand. Made from carbon fiber and silicone with touch sensors in the fingers that allow users to feel via a vibration motor on their limb, it’s the first hand on the market to give users touch feedback. According to the company, it’s also the fastest hand available.

Born with a limb difference, DiMassi, 46, says that when he was growing up in the ’80s, his journey with prosthetics was a mixed bag.

“Being an active kid, it felt like my prosthetics at the time got in the way. The technology wasn’t where I needed it to be,” he recalls, adding that before the Ability Hand, he hadn’t regularly worn a prosthetic for 30 years. “I grew up watching Star Wars. I saw when they fit Luke with a bionic hand, and I always thought, Someday, that’s what will be out there. That’s what I’ll be able to experience.”

But prosthetics tech was slow to catch up to an iPhone world. Until now.

“We’re working with the Navy hospital and UCSD on bone and nerve integration,” says Psyonic founder and CEO Dr. Aadeel Akhtar. “The idea is that, instead of feeling a vibration on your residual limb, we can stimulate the nerves directly and make it feel like it’s coming from your hand that you don’t have anymore.”

What that means is that the Ability Hand could soon operate as a second, fully functioning hand, anchored into users’ forearm bones for permanent stability and plugged into their nerves for feeling and control.

“Touch a finger, and your brain is interpreting that as your phantom finger being touched,” Akhtar continues. “That will make it seem like the Ability Hand is not just a tool that’s on your body but rather an extension. Our goal is that when we get to a clinical trial on this, hopefully in a year-and-a-half to two years, that we might have our first patients playing piano or typing on a keyboard again.”

“This is huge,” says Dr. James Flint, a San Diego military and civilian orthopedic oncologist and surgeon partnering with Psyonic on clinical trials. “What we’re exploring is finer wires, more wires, more connections, so that more function can be had from a robotic hand. It’s really futuristic and impressive Star Wars stuff.”

Also working with Pysonic is Dr. Katharine Hinchcliff, a plastic surgeon and professor at UCSD and Rady Children’s Hospital who specializes in hand surgeries. She believes a future in which the Ability Hand and other prosthetics go beyond integrating with the arm muscles and instead connect directly with the brain could happen in her lifetime.

“The rate of technology change even since I’ve been in practice has been huge,” she says. “I think the opportunities with machine learning are going to really speed up our ability to make a really excellent prosthetic.”

It’s all part of a grand plan that Akhtar put in place when he moved his company from Chicago to San Diego in 2022.

“We truly believe that we have all the resources in San Diego to make it the bionics capital of the world,” he says from inside Pysonic’s new, expanded Rancho Bernardo offices, where the company is also developing a wrist, elbow, knee, and ankle. Akhtar adds that the company is planning to grow production from the current 1,000 Ability Hands per year to 10,000.

The market he’s aiming for extends beyond humans. Psyonic is also working to equip humanoid robots. “It’s the same hand that goes on humans that goes on robots,” Akhtar says. “And the same way that our humans can control these devices, that is going to be very analogous to how the robots are going to do it, too.”

Akhtar incorporated the company in 2015. In 2020, Pysonic raised a $1.4 million seed round. In the years since, it’s brought in millions through grants and an equity crowdfunding campaign that was boosted by a $1 million spike in interest after Akhtar appeared on the show Shark Tank. Investors on the show pledged an additional $1 million, which isstillbeingfinalized.Alltold,Akhtar says, Psyonic has secured more than $10 million in equity and grant funding.

Much of the allure centers on the Ability Hand’s tough yet pliable design. The fingers on the Ability Hand move laterally when bumped. They don’t break like more traditional, rigid prosthetics. “If you hit your own fingers, they bend out of the way, right?” Akhtar says. “We took a soft robotics approach. I can smash this hand and it survives. We’ve shown our users breaking flaming boards with their hand. I climbed the roof of my house and dropped the hand 30 feet in the air. We put in a dryer for 10 minutes. It survived all that.”

Akhtar has a flair for dramatic showmanship. At this year’s Comic-Con, he dressed as Doctor Octopus, the Marvel antihero who sports four extra metal appendages. At the end of Akhtar’s additional arms were Ability Hands, each controlled individually via app.

Akhtar grew up in Chicago as a comic book– and sci-fi-loving first-gen son of Pakistani immigrants with plans to become an MD. It was a childhood trip that shifted his focus.

“When I was 7, I was visiting where my parents are from, and that was the first time I met someone missing a limb. She was my age, missing her right leg and using a tree branch as a crutch,” he says. “We had the same ethnic heritage, but we had such vastly different qualities of life. And as I grew older, I began to realize that this was due to a lack of resources, right? So, security, health care, financial resources—it just stuck with me.”

Akhtar’s journey to founding Psyonic was a detour from the med school path he once envisioned. After earning a bachelor’s in biology and a master’s in computer science at Loyola University Chicago, he went on to complete a second master’s in electrical and computer engineering and a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I actually left med school for this,” he says with a laugh. “Building bionic hands was more fun.”

And the seed planted on that childhood trip to Pakistan stuck with him. “We learned that 80 percent of people with limb differences are in developing nations, and less than three percent have access to affordable rehabilitative care,” Akhtar says. “And, since [we realized] that, accessibility has been in our blood. We have over 250 human users of the hand, and because it’s covered under Medicare in the US, we expanded access from 10 percent of patients who could afford the most advanced bionic hand to 75 percent.”

Akhtar adds that the company is working to continue advancing Ability Hand technology while keeping it affordable.

“We run really lean,” he says. “That’s intentional. To make a hand Medicare would cover, we had to keep the cost down. So we develop tech in-house and use low-cost manufacturing methods.”

Each Ability Hand currently costs between $15,000 and $20,000—already competitive in the advanced prosthetics market—but Psyonic is aiming to go even lower. “As our volumes go up, that price will go down, especially on the robotic side,” Akhtar says. “We’re targeting $5,000 eventually, which could help us get Medicaid coverage, too. That’s how we make this truly accessible. That’s how we get it into developing nations.”

The Ability Hand comes with a series of 32 pre-programed grips, of which users can choose four at a time to quickly toggle through via muscle movement. Think grips for driving, drinking coffee, and carrying grocery bags, but also presets for rock-on gestures, peace signs, and—yes—even the bird. With the app, users can fully operate the hand, switch grips, and program the hand to perform personalized movements.

Xzaiver Garcia is a 26-year-old US Navy veteran who lost his hand while on deployment in 2022

“I had to learn how to do everything with one hand,” he says. “When I got the Ability Hand, it was easier going back to normal than the transition from having two hands to one.”

He’s now been using the Ability Hand for a year-and-a-half.

“It makes everyday life so much easier,” he says. “Simple things—things you take for granted, like opening the fridge. And it’s really good at playing pool. It’s helped me get back to doing that.”

Mandy Pursley is a sewing hobbyist based in North Carolina who incorporates her Ability Hand into costumes she creates. At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, she dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz with ruby red slippers and a glittering, ruby red bionic hand.

Born with a limb difference, Pursley, 42, echoes DiMassi’s frustrations around navigating prosthetics as a youngster. She says she was more functional without prosthetics, wearing them mostly for cosmetic reasons and removing them as soon as she got home. Eventually, she quit utilizing them altogether. “I wanted to be my most functional self to take care of my baby, and I didn’t really care what I looked like, so I stopped wearing prosthetics for several years,” she says.

But the Ability Hand shifted her perspective.

“The Ability Hand was the first time in my life that I actually felt like the prosthetic would be beneficial for me,” she says. “I can pin fabric; I can thread a needle. I can do all these really fine motor skills.”

She’s been wearing the hand for three years, creating unique grips of her own for sewing and other specific tasks.

“I made a custom grip that barely opens the thumb a little bit so I can hold the jewelry pliers and open and close them to actually make jewelry,” she says. “Being able to create those custom grips means that I can make this hand work for me in the ways that I need to use it and not just the way someone else thought that I would want to use it. It’s amazing. It’s completely changed my life.”

She, too, is struck by the potential of a more fully integrated, surgically implanted hand. No apps, no pre-set grips.

“I actually get really emotional about it, because one day I might actually feel like I have two completely functional hands that I can use with individual finger movements, and I never thought that would even be a possibility in my lifetime,” she says. “To go from wearing a cosmetic hand that had no functionality to thinking that, before I’m gone, I could have a completely functional hand is just really profound.”

If trials go according to plan, someday soon that dream of a piano duet could sound like music, and what once seemed like science fiction to DiMassi, Pursley, and countless others could quietly become another ordinary way of life.