Prosthetic arms have never been cool or fun for kids to wear, but Disney is helping change that line of thinking in a big way.
Disney has teamed up with Open Bionics to create three prosthetic arms designed to look like Iron Man, Frozen’s Elsa, and a Star Wars lightsaber. The three arms will be affordably priced around $500 thanks in part to Disney agreeing to drop the standard licensing fee they normally charge companies for using their brands.
Thanks to these new arms, kids will be able to have the coolest limbs anyone has ever seen.
“Kids absolutely love them,” said Open Bionics’s Joel Gibbard to The Independent. “They pick it up straight away. To them, the most exciting thing is the lights and the look of it, but once they start using it they start challenging themselves to pick up small objects and start stacking things.”
Here’s Logan, a kid born without a hand, using the Star Wars arm:
The prosthetics also double as toys of sorts, further winning over the kids who will own them. For example, the Star Wars lightsaber arm “emits the threatening electronic buzz familiar to millions of Star Wars fans” and can change colors.
The Iron Man arm boasts “a mode that uses the LEDs mounted in its surface to display the muscle signals the child is sending to the device.” Not only is this an impressive feature for kids, but “parents or health professionals ‘can see what’s happening under the surface.'”
Most importantly, the special arms shift the inevitable conversations about prosthetic arms kids have to deal with from, “Why do you have a different arm?” to, “How did you get such a cool arm?”
“The power of these prosthetics is that the public perception is completely different,” said Gibbard. “All of a sudden they’re not being asked how they lost their hand, they’re being asked where they got their cool robot hand, how does it feel, and how does it work? It completely flips the perception 180 degrees. What might have been perceived as their greatest weakness is seen as their greatest strength.”
The partnership between Disney and Open Bionics came about after the latter received a $120,000 grant through a program connecting startups with big companies like the Mouse House. Open Bionics visited Disney’s offices in California to work with the designers behind Iron Man, Frozen, and even Star Wars to make their products authentic.
Nice move, Disney!
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