A helping hand for student entrepreneurs

Joel Gibbard is the founder of Bristol-based Open Bionics, which aims to develop a low-cost prosthetic hand suitable for amputees around the world. A graduate of Plymouth University, Joel believes that any engineering student with strong ideas should be able to start up their own company to develop their concepts.

Joel graduated in 2011, having qualified from Plymouth’s BEng course in robotics, which he says ‘was a really good introduction with lots of hands-on content, covering fundamentals of control engineering, computer science and mechanical engineering.’ However, it didn’t focus on specific areas of robotics, such as industrial and prosthetics. ‘We did touch on some of those areas, but not in detail.’ he comments.

Joel’s final-year project was his first prototype robotic hand. ‘I’d looked at advanced robotic prostheses and I thought they were amazing bits of engineering, but they were rather inaccessible for most amputees because they were just so expensive, tens of thousands of pounds. I wanted to change that.’