Nic Hite

As an amputee, I’ve been an on-again-off-again prosthetics user for almost 30 years. I wore an early stage myoelectric hand in 1994, then I didn’t wear a prosthetic at all until 2010. Many amputees are fine without prosthetics, by the way. I was born with one hand, and I’ve never really had trouble doing anything. This isn’t unique or special at all. The more amputees I meet, the more I am certain that–with or without assistive devices–we have been vastly underestimated by the public.

Over the course of my engineering career, I’ve worked in labs at Harvard, MIT, and NASA. I wrote a lot of code at Google. But now I’m all about creating wearable robots that help people–namely, bionics and exoskeletons.

I got my latest hand in 2020. It consists of a TASKA Prosthetic Hand, a pattern recognition system called COAPT Complete Control Gen2, and a custom-built socket from Arm Dynamics. I mainly use prosthetics not to improve my function but rather to prevent overuse injuries and maintain body symmetry as I age.

This project is an attempt to build a whole new class of bionic devices.

Project Mostly Human

To be honest, it started out as kind of a goof. In fact, my original name for this was “Stupid Prosthetics”, a series of small projects where I’d create all sorts of unnecessary and unhelpful prosthetic devices for everyday living. Really, it was just an effort to shake the stigma of prosthetics as stiff and sterile medical devices for “victims”.

But after I really sat down and started brainstorming, I had a bunch of ideas that I thought were actually pretty solid. The mission of Project Mostly Human is thus:

  1. Build and evaluate every open-source prosthetic arm under the Sun.
  2. Build new types of prosthetic devices that function in ways completely unlike the hand-shaped, general grasping devices we’re used to.
  3. Do 1) and 2) in such a way to amplify positive, realistic representation of amputees and people with disabilities.

In a bit more detail:

1. Build and Test All Open-Source Prosthetics

You see posts about them all the time–heartwarming stories, usually involving children, of people who just received a new 3D-printed prosthetic hand. Maybe it’s Avengers-themed, delivered by Robert Downey Jr. in an emotional display. You see the kid pick up a ball with the new hand, and they cry and the parents cry and you cry because they are “fixed”.

Problem is, real-life prosthetics usage isn’t just about picking up a ball and putting it back down. My hunch is that the vast majority of open-source prosthetic hands and arms are completely unusable in any real fashion. Why do I think this? Because even the best available top-of-the-line bionic arms (I own one of them) are clunky and barely passable representations of human limbs.

Ever notice that you can’t really find any videos or gifs of bionics users performing complex tasks? It’s always just the basics: pick up round object, put it back down. I’m guessing it’s because they can’t actually do that much. If they could, wouldn’t all bionics company PR departments blast that content everywhere? My current arm is light-years ahead of anything I used to wear, but you need to remember that amputees are generally quite functional without prosthetics. So the bar for helping people, rather than hindering their function, is actually quite high.

I plan to put all devices I build through a grueling, standardized gauntlet of tests. This testing suite will be the same used by prosthetists and occupational therapists for their devices. I’ll record my efforts in a series of blogs and YouTube videos. Are any of these devices any good? Let’s find out. If so, they can influence my future designs. If not, I can make a note of it to prevent potential device recipients from wasting their time.

The biggest and best-documented repository of such hands is maintained by the e-NABLE Community, and their devices will suffer my scrutiny first. But the more I look, the more I find one-off designs by hobbyists on GitHub.

2. Take Bionics in a New Direction

I’ve studied bionic arms for a long time and have used them for even longer. Given the trajectory of devices over the last few decades, to me the time horizon looks like this:

  • Twenty years ago - early-stage bionics were basically unusable. When I was two, I always hated using mine and was more functional without it.
  • Present day - bionic devices aren’t very good. The most functional prosthetic is still the body-powered hook. In particular, hands have lots of trouble performing high-dexterity (or even medium-dexterity) tasks. I’m still more functional overall while not wearing my bionic arm.
  • Far future - bionic devices will perfectly emulate a human hand. Maybe they’ll be implanted, talk to your brain directly, whatever. It will take a few decades to get here.

What I see missing is the near-future class of bionics, specialized for interacting with technology. Typing on a keyboard, operating a phone, and using a DSLR camera or game controller usually requires a lot of the high-dexterity motion I mentioned above, what with all the buttons, sticks, and knobs. Current prosthetics can’t do it, and the “ideal” future prosthetics are too far away.

When using EMG or other sensor technology, we already have a rough understanding of user intent translated into the realm of ones and zeros. Instead of using that to actuate a physical hand, why not just connect directly to a device? The first of my designs will explore this idea.

I’m partnering with e-NABLE to expand the types of open-source bionic devices available to the public. We’re working on a new open-source bionics platform for tinkerers to experiment with, and I’ll be making all of my designs available on their hub.

3. Make a Positive Impact in the Amputee Community

This one is gonna take a long time, especially since progress on my custom bionics is slow. To speed things up, well, I started making silly videos on the internet in an attempt to expose as many people as possible to a more realistic depiction of what it’s like to be an amputee and use prosthetics.

And I gotta say, they’ve had way more traction than I could have imagined. My one-hand jokes and bionics explainers have somehow gotten millions of views on Reels and TikTok. I was hoping my content would be popular, but what I never expected was the sheer number of people who reached out and shared experiences that were just like mine. If you’re one of those who connected with me, I thank you. I’ve never felt more a part of the community than I do at this moment.

Progress is Slow

As you can tell, this site is currently pretty bare. It turns out that creating bionic devices takes a lot of time. Who knew? I’ll be updating this site regularly with new projects or just my thoughts in the blog. Thanks for reading!