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Some will go through four or five devices before they become adults – all at a price of around $80,000. Children grow out of their prosthetic arms nearly as fast as shoes. “The heart-breaking statistic is that half the people who have an arm prosthetic don’t wear it,” says Sean Jones, Vice President of Business Development at Unlimited Tomorrow. A typical child’s arm prosthetic weighs anywhere from 2.5 to four pounds – and even that is too heavy for many kids. LaChappelle quickly learned that, as advanced as his robotic arm was, he would have to take it to new heights of innovation to disrupt the arm prosthetic market – particularly for the patients he wanted to help: children like that seven-year-old girl who had inspired him.įor one thing, the arm LaChappelle built weighed eight pounds. Unlimited Tomorrow’s quest…and its challenges “I’ve always wanted to help them physically – and you’re the man to do that.” Two months after LaChappelle’s eighteenth birthday, in February 2014, Robbins provided start-up capital to launch Unlimited Tomorrow in February 2014. “He said to me, I’ve helped people all around the world psychologically,” LaChappelle recounts. Speaking to the promise of affordable, personalised prosthetics, LaChappelle got a standing ovation from the crowd…and a call from renowned motivational speaker and life coach Tony Robbins.
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That was my a-ha moment.”Ī month after that moment, LaChappelle was invited to give a TEDx talk in Denver. I thought, ‘this can’t be true I built my arm for $300 in my bedroom.’ It was unacceptable to me. “I found out that her prosthesis had cost $80,000, only had a pinching device, and would soon be outgrown because it had taken a year to create. What he learned both disheartened and inspired him.
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LaChappelle started talking with the girl and her parents to find out how her prosthetic arm worked. That was the first time I ever saw someone with that type of technology.” “I was at the Colorado State Science Fair,” he recalls, “when I noticed this little girl examining the finger motions of my robotic arm. Before long, LaChappelle was traveling the world, doing keynote speeches.Īll that happened in 2013 – and as heady as the media recognition was for a small-town teenager – it was a quieter moment that year that had the biggest impact on LaChappelle. Then President Obama was shaking hands with his robotic arm at the White House. Soon, LaChappelle was doing an internship at NASA. Having a Transformer-like arm that could throw a baseball and shake hands was slightly more attention grabbing than your typical exploding volcano. LaChappelle entered his robotic arm in several science fairs – and that’s when his fortunes took off. Then he moved on to the forearm…then the elbow…then the shoulder, until he had a complete arm. He improved the hand’s individual finger motion and its opposable thumb. That’s when he bought a cheap laser-cut wood 3D printer and started running it 24/7.
Siemens nx 11 trial#
Cobbling together a MacGyver-like assortment of household items – fishing wire, Legos, electrical tape, windshield wiper motors, whatever he could find – he spent nine months of relentless trial and error and, in his words, “failing pretty hard.”Įventually, LaChappelle did create a rudimentary robotic hand, but it wasn’t until his sixteenth birthday that he really began advancing his design – and setting the course for his unlikely future. LaChappelle decided that making a remotely controlled robotic hand would be a fitting challenge for his passions. “I started holing up in my bedroom, surfing the internet, and teaching myself everything I needed to know about robotics,” LaChappelle says.