Aadeel Ahktar (00:00)

We had a version that was carbon fiber like this, and then we had a version that we vinyl wrapped so it look like his hand. To our surprise, he said that he actually preferred the black bionic look. And his reason was he said that when he walks down the street with the bionic hand, he feels like Robocop. And we realized that it's because it gives him ownership of that narrative, right? That this isn't something to be afraid of, it's not something to be pitied.

This is something for him to be proud of. He was a national war hero, right? That's how he lost his hand. It gives him that sense of pride and confidence when he goes out that he doesn't have to really worry about like, what are people going to think because they see this and they're like, you have a bionic hand? That's that's so super cool.

Brian Heater (00:50)

Hey everybody, it's Brian Heater back with another episode of Automated from A3. We have a very special one for you this week. I actually saw Adeel Akhtar give a talk at an event in London over the summer and was so impressed with Psionic's mission statement that I asked him to appear at our upcoming Humanoid Robotics Forum in Seattle in September. We'll get into why a prosthetic hand company is a good fit for a Humanoid event.

During this conversation, we also asked him to share his psionic experiences on this week show to give some insight into how companies are creating technologies that can actually change the world for the better. It's an inspiring chat. I hope you enjoy. Before this, I was at TechCrunch for a while and you know, we got a lot of pitches and it's clear that a part of the conversations that happen or the trading is to.

to tell the VC or the Shark Tank host or whoever you're pitching to about your journey. And you've got a really good one and it started a long time ago. And I'm wondering if it was really as much of a straight shot as it sounds like.

Aadeel Ahktar (02:02)

Yeah, I mean, it was definitely like very circuitous, right? Because my original plan was to become a medical doctor. So the goal was always to work with people with limb differences, right? So people missing a limb in the prosthetic space in particular. so that's ever since I was seven years old, that's what I wanted to do. The question was always, what is the best way to do that, right? When I went to Loyola University Chicago for undergrad, I was a pre-med student and the goal was to become a medical doctor that worked with people missing limbs. It wasn't until my sophomore year of undergrad that I took my first computer science class and I loved it. And I realized that if I become a straight up MD, I don't get to do any of the cool stuff that I was learning in my engineering classes. So I wanted to figure out a way to combine that. And that's really where this...thrust into bionics came about in particular. And right down the street, there was a hospital, it's now called the Shirley Ron ability lab. It was the rehabilitation Institute of Chicago before then. And they had these incredible breakthroughs in these mind controlled bionic limbs that were controlled by like your nerves and they were doing surgeries. And that was kind of what spurred me on a slightly different path that combining engineering and medicine.

And then I went on a trip to Ecuador during my PhD and met a patient who controlled a very early prototype of our hand for the very first time. And that made me realize that a startup or a company was the best way to make the most impact in the world as opposed to going through academia.

Brian Heater (03:35)

to back up much further. So it ? was a trip to Pakistan that really got you on that secretive route.

Aadeel Ahktar (03:42)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so ? I was born in Chicago. My parents are from ? Karachi in Pakistan. And that's where I was visiting when I was seven. 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. And that's what inspired me to want to work in this field in particular, in making limbs for people and.

Brian Heater (04:01)

not robots. That's an interesting part of that story as well. The fact that she was using a tree branch would lead me to believe that they weren't a family of means that they, you know, probably didn't have the resources to spend a lot of money on prosthesis. So how much of that was a part of the initial goal for the company is really driving the price down and making it as accessible as possible.

Aadeel Ahktar (04:26)

Yeah, that was definitely in our lifeblood since the beginning as well too, because we knew that accessibility was an issue for devices, especially advanced devices like the ones that we build. From the beginning, even before the company was even founded, so we founded the company in 2015 while I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois.

But a year before we founded the company, we started working with a nonprofit organization called the Range of Motion Project. And their mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them, primarily in Guatemala and Ecuador. Their mission had really resonated with me because it reminded me of when I was seven years old and I was visiting that girl in Pakistan for the very first time and she couldn't afford a prosthetic limb. She was living in poverty. And here was a nonprofit organization that was doing something to actually change that inequality.

around the world, starting with Latin America and then eventually expanding worldwide. One of the co-founders and the former executive director of the Range of Motion Project, David Krupa, he's an alum from the University of Illinois, and that's how he got in contact. And that just really resonated with us that we're 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.

Brian Heater (05:46)

Again, as you said earlier, maybe computer scientists and roboticists were not necessarily on your life goal to start out with. And I assume that until like relatively recently, I guess a decade or so ago, ? C level executive probably wasn't like that high on your list either. Is that fair to say?

Aadeel Ahktar (06:08)

It's totally fair to say. ? was the route that even 10 years ago, the route that I was originally planning at that point was I was in an MD PhD program. So my PhD was in ? Neuroscience, but I have a master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering. But 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, we would build devices like this, where we would test them on potential patients. And it was the Ecuador trip that I was mentioning that when we made that in 2014, the

user who tried our prosthetic hand for the very first time. Internally, we call that version of the hand Mark II was the second version of the Ability Hand. There's three times the size of an average adult human hand. Wires going everywhere, pulling the breadboards, power supplies, the wall, you name it. And Juan, our very first patient ever, he 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.

And that's when I realized that if I stay in academia, this just ends up as a journal paper. 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.

Brian Heater (07:35)

Yeah, I heard you because you we met at the humanoid summit in London a couple of weeks ago and I heard you tell the pinch story and I'm curious if you get a sense of why it was that gesture specifically that really resonated with him.

Aadeel Ahktar (07:51)

I think it's because, so one, that was one of the pre-programmed grips that we had in the hand, right? So we had a machine learning and AI algorithm that would detect his muscle signals and then use that to generate ? the movements that we would have in the hand for these pre-programmed grips. So basically imagine this, the training session takes about like two minutes and the hand would do different grips. So it'd hold like a fist, it would make a pinch, it would do like a lateral grasp, it would do like a tripod grip.

And then the user is tasked with mimicking those same movements for about like 15 seconds each that trains the AI algorithm to learn those muscle patterns associated with those grips. And then after those two minutes, the next time you try making that grip, the AI algorithm says, ? these muscle patterns look like the ones that you tried to make a pinch with, and we're going to make the hand do the same thing. And so when...

we asked him to do this training procedure and he was trying to make a pinch. He actually didn't remember how to because it had been 35 years and he was like, I don't know exactly how to make a pinch with this hand anymore on this side because it was using muscles that he hadn't really used before like in 35 years.

What we did is we actually did mirror therapy where we took a mirror and we placed it in front of his amputated side, reflecting his right hand, tricking his brain into thinking that his left hand was there. And so when he tried making a pinch now with both sides, it reactivated his muscles and it was a unique enough muscle signal that the AI algorithm was able to detect that it was him trying to make a pinch. And then he was able to effectively do that on the prosthetic hand. for him,

It was almost like he reawakened this ability that he didn't have anymore, that he thought he didn't have anymore from 35 years prior.

Brian Heater (09:47)

Yeah, those are my favorite science things when it's something that like I would have come up with when I was five years old, like tricking the brain with the mirror. Like it's incredible that that works. Right? I mean, I'm that like a big part of your work just generally both as a medical doctor and what you're doing now is connected to neurology. Is that fair to say?

Aadeel Ahktar (10:09)

Yeah, absolutely. ? I will contend that I did end up dropping out of medical school to run the psionic full time. I did finish the PhD, but my family, they looked down on me for not having finished that medical degree. I'm just kidding.

Brian Heater (10:26)

I mean, you know, like I've heard stories like that. It's like even if you're successful in another field, you know, they had like a very specific idea of what path they want you to

Aadeel Ahktar (10:35)

I will say my parents did want me and both of my older brothers to all get medical degrees and none of us did but I did come the closest. I was actually in medical school.

Brian Heater (10:47)

Yeah, that's that's that's funny. So that trip that you took to Pakistan, do you feel like they were kind of like pushing you in that direction at that early age?

Aadeel Ahktar (10:55)

I think they were pushing me in that direction since I was born, like even before was seven years old. ?

Brian Heater (11:02)

The transition to executive is interesting because, you know, I've been covering robotics specifically for several years now. And there's a lot of stories of technical founders, you know, people who start in the lab, who started research universities, they spin out, they're the CEO or even like CTO at the time. And then once the company really matures and they kind of bring the ringers in, right, they bring like the executive executives in how much of a learning curve has this process been for you?

Aadeel Ahktar (11:34)

Yeah,I mean, it was definitely a huge learning curve because I mean, it was basically at the beginning to is learning how to speak a different language entirely. Right. ? And one of the the things that helped in that journey to is that coming from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I mean, there's a long history of commercialization that came out of there, right? Like YouTube was created there. ? A lot of the like the some of the PayPal founders came from there as well, too.

They had a really good infrastructure on how to take engineering and turn it into a startup and a company. They have an incubator space over there at Enterprise Works. They've got an accelerator program that's now world renowned as well, too, the iVenture Accelerator. And we participated in all of those programs. And ? that really helped us to learn the lean startup methodology like Steve Blank stuff and ? customer discovery and testing our hypotheses and ROI and like building on a business plan and putting together a pitch deck. And those are all new concepts to me because we, coming from an engineering background, coming from a medical background, you don't do any of that stuff.

Brian Heater (12:50)

Yeah, feel like pitch decks maybe aren't that far from like a school assignment, right? But obviously it's a very

Aadeel Ahktar (12:55)

Sure. gonna have like an LTV over CAC in a school assignment though, right?

Brian Heater (13:03)

I guess it depends on what you're studying. yeah, that's fair. That's fair. What is is I'm not familiar with the lean method is, is that just start small and stay small?

Aadeel Ahktar (13:11)

It's definitely very focused around just customer discovery, right? Like getting out of the lab, going out there and talking to as many end users as possible before you really start to build so that you know that what you're building will have the product market fit that needs. And it challenged a lot of our early assumptions right off the bat. And so one of the things I mentioned earlier was that when we started, we fully 3D printed the hand, right? And if you're ever out in our offices in San Diego,

In the lobby, we've got every single generation of our hands since 2014 that we've developed. And the first four are all fully 3D printed. And it was around 2015, 2016 that we started doing this customer discovery process. And we started talking with as many end users of the hand as possible, as many clinicians as possible. And the number one thing they complained about

which we thought would be the price. you know, these bionic hands are like $50,000 to like $100,000. It wasn't the price. It was that their 50 to $100,000 hand was breaking within a month of them using it or a couple months of them using it. It wasn't because they were doing anything crazy, but they would accidentally like hit their hand against the side of a table. And because they were made out of these rigid components, they would just snap at the joints, but your own fingers, your own natural fingers, if you hit it, has...

appliance that has flexibility, by the way, it comes back without so that it doesn't snap at the joints. And we were like, if we give someone a 3D printed hand, they're going to break this thing within like a minute of using it. So how could we still leverage the low cost of 3D printing, but still have this hand be more robust than anything else that's out there? There was a lot of work being done, especially at the Yale Grab Labs or Dollars Group out there on soft robotics in particular. And they had this

beautiful video, this hand that they had created called the I-High hand. It was like a three finger grasper, right? That was tendon driven, but it was using these molded soft components. And they were holding this baseball and they grabbed the baseball and they took a baseball bat and they just swung it and just launched the baseball out of these fingers, right? And this whole thing is happening in a split second, less than 500 milliseconds. So

When you look at the video in real time, it's just like, okay, you're just like knocking it out and the hands are working fine. But then they put it in slow motion and you see the fingers just like wildly like moving about and then like immediately getting back to its original position. And I was like, that, that is the kind of technology that is crucial to the prosthetic side and eventually the robotic side as well too. mean, there's already on the robotic side for them.

And if the number one problem is robustness, well, then let's incorporate these soft robotics components in the hand. And so we developed our own compliant four bar linkage. And so if you see on the fingers here, they're flexible, right? So I can take this and can smash it. totally survived the impact. And I can even pop the hand off. It survives that too. I've stepped on it, put it in a dryer for 10 minutes. I've arm wrestled the paratriathlete national champion in loss. It pops back on in the socket and it'll recalibrate. ?

Like nothing happened at all. Right. And by staying lean, I mean, we could have been developing these like hardcore 3D printed hands for years and then find out when we actually bring it to the market that, we're not going to sell any of these hands because they're going to break all the time. But by going through that lean methodology and this customer discovery process, we found that product market fit earlier on. And that helped significantly accelerate our timelines.

Brian Heater (16:56)

Yeah, are so I mean you made it sound like you're still using 3D printing in some respect I see for prototyping but are there any 3D printed parts on the hand.

Aadeel Ahktar (17:06)

There are actually, and so a lot of the internals are still 3D printed. So there's like a flexible 3D printed bone inside the fingers. The palms are 3D printed, but we'll always like reinforce them with materials that are more resilient, right? So we have silicone over the fingers and then we've got carbon fiber. So this is actual carbon fiber that reinforces the palms. And that's why it's able to withstand all these blunt force impacts and stresses and strains.