Student hails bionic hand that transformed his life

Published on Monday 19 January 2009 21:17

A STUDENT who lost his hand in a horrific car accident told yesterday how a Scottish technology company had allowed him to resume doing the "hundreds of everyday things" he once took for granted.

Evan Reynolds said it took him just minutes to adapt to an advanced bionic hand that has won its West Lothian manufacturers a host of awards.

The 19-year-old, the second person in Britain to have the revolutionary i-Limb fitted, said the device was so advanced that he was able to perform tasks such as peeling a potato, swinging a racket, or catching a ball.

Mr Reynolds, a sports biology student at the University of the West of England, had his left hand ripped off three years ago as a friend drove him home from a day out.

He was sitting in the passenger seat with his hand resting on the window ledge when the vehicle scraped a wooden post at an exit to a car park. The hand was severed instantly. "It was very nasty," he recalled. "It was amputated in a second."

The accident forced Mr Reynolds, from Surrey, to reassess his ambitions, chief among them his dream of a career in the army. He said: "I dreamed of going to Sandhurst. I couldn't join the army any more and I was devastated."

However, one day his elder brother, Richard, saw a television report on a firm called Touch Bionics, in Livingston. Its 10,000 i-Limb device was just a prototype, but Mr Reynolds underwent a series of tests and became the second person in Britain to have one fitted.

Muscle signals known as myoelectrics from Mr Reynolds' arm allow him to open and close the hand's life-like fingers.

Movement is controlled by a series of tiny motors attached by electrodes to the remaining muscles in his lower arm.

Existing prosthetics work in a similar way, but leave users unable to vary the strength of their grip, whereas the i-Limb has the dexterity to pick up a paper cup without crushing it.

Mr Reynolds explained: "The most amazing thing about it was how quickly I adapted to it. I put it on and within minutes I was using it as well as I can today.

"People always ask how it's changed my life, but there's no specific thing. It's the hundreds of everyday things you take for granted, which I can do again – like peeling a potato, catching a ball, holding a bottle of water.

"I'm incredibly grateful to my brother for looking it up and to Touch Bionics for developing the hand."

Time magazine named the i-Limb as one of the Top 50 inventions of last year, and Touch Bionics won the Limbless Association's Prosthetic Product Innovation Award for 2008 for it.

The firm has recently expanded to the US, where American soldiers who have been injured in action are among those who have benefited.

Donald McKillop, a retired welder from Kilmarnock, had an i-Limb fitted in 2006. He now continues his hobbies of woodworking and gardening.