How a Loyola alum built the world’s first touch-sensing bionic hand

Akhtar is the high-octane, whip-smart CEO behind it all. He buzzes around the company’s 5,000-square-foot facility in San Diego, California, overseeing a team that has swelled to more than 30 employees, including engineers, doctors, social workers, and public health experts. In 2024, the company raised $4.1 million in seed funding, and, with demand far outpacing production, it is planning to move to a facility more than four times larger in the coming months.

Dr. James Flint, an orthopedic oncologist and active member of the U.S. Navy, who has fitted the Ability Hand on civilian and military patients at care facilities at UC San Diego Health in La Jolla and the Naval Medical Center San Diego, says, “It is arguably one of the most, if not the most, advanced prosthetics for restoring function to transradial [below elbow] amputees.”

The Ability Hand resembles the bionic hand worn by Marvel’s Tony Stark in his Iron Man alias. It is made of a carbon-fiber shell and squishy silicone fingers that are remarkably lifelike. Once connected by Bluetooth to a smartphone app, it can be configured to shake hands, grip a mug, or make the Loyola Rambler wolf symbol.

Sensors detect electric signals from muscle contractions in a patient’s residual limb to activate finger grips and movements. Perhaps its most novel feature is a haptic motor that vibrates to let users know when and how firmly they are touching objects.

“No other hands have touch sensing,” says Annika Berlin, a user experience specialist at PSYONIC who was born without her left forearm. “I can do so many things now that are easier two-handed, like steering a car or holding a hot pan of stir fry while scraping off the bottom,” she says.

A Loyola love story

None of PSYONIC’s breakthroughs happened without Akhtar experiencing the pain of early failures, financial strain, and late nights of soul searching. Yet, in some ways, his remarkable career path—in 2021, he appeared in Newsweek’s “America’s 50 Greatest Disruptors: Visionaries Who Are Changing the World”—seems almost foreordained, as if the universe were sending him signals.

When he was 7 years old, Akhtar and his family traveled to Karachi, Pakistan, along the Arabian Sea, to visit relatives who lived in the city. On an outing to an open-air bazaar with his mother, he met a girl his age who was missing her right leg. She was using a tree branch as a crutch to walk because her parents were unable to afford an alternative. It struck a nerve.

“I thought about it at the time, and years later, that we shared the same ethnic heritage but had such vastly different qualities of life,” Akhtar says. “And it wasn’t just financial: It was security, health care, all these things, and it made me want to work toward a more equitable future.”

He carried that formative memory to Loyola, where he enrolled as a biology student in 2004, with the eventual aim of becoming a neurosurgeon specializing in limb differences. His wife, Whitney Akhtar (BA ’07, MSW ’10), who works closely with Aadeel as director of executive support and people at PSYONIC, was also a Loyola student.

The two met at Streamwood High School outside Chicago, and when Aadeel arrived on campus, they became romantically involved. Aadeel, who had been his high school’s valedictorian, tore through his coursework, graduating from Loyola in three years. But his academic direction took a hard fork as a sophomore when he enrolled in Comp 170: Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, a course taught by Andrew Harrington, a now-retired professor. Enthralled, Aadeel saw an opportunity to merge his “interest in prosthetics … with computer science and engineering,” he says.

He went on to earn his master’s degree in computer science at Loyola, and the couple held a small, 40-person wedding at Piper Hall on campus, serving a biryani salad fusion dish to guests outside the American foursquare mansion overlooking Lake Michigan. Over the next two years, Whitney pursued a master’s degree in social work at Loyola, and Aadeel taught Comp 170 as an adjunct, charming students with an end-of-the-year LEGO Mindstorms robot sumo battle, during which, Whitney says, he would arrive in a martial arts uniform and emcee the blow-by-blow as bots duked it out on a lab table.

By the couple’s own admission, the years that followed were a struggle. In 2010, still in their early twenties, they resettled on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Whitney worked in hospice care, while Aadeel pursued joint master’s and doctoral degrees. When, two years away from completing his degree, Aadeel returned from Ecuador and announced his intention to start PSYONIC, Whitney flushed.

“‘Excuse me, what are you even talking about right now?’” she recalls telling him. “‘We’re so late to this adult thing. Will we ever start to have a stable, ordinary life?’”

But Aadeel made his case. “He told me about the moment with Juan, and it was a no-brainer. He had to do it. So we both went all in,” she says.

Less than two months after the company incorporated, the couple’s first baby, Zain, was born. “I joked that he had his baby, and I had mine,” Whitney says. For several years, she devoted her time to raising their son and the couple’s daughter, Zara, who was born just two years later.

But when Aadeel came to her seeking ideas for how to protect the wiring between the Ability Hand’s palm and fingers, she couldn’t keep herself away. A self-trained seamstress, Whitney had created costumes for anime conventions the couple attended as students. It wasn’t a big leap to sew fabric sleeves for the Ability Hand. She did that and more, taking over payroll and HR. Eventually, she was logging well over 40 hours a week.

Meanwhile, PSYONIC was surging ahead. In 2019, the Ability Hand became a registered Class I medical device under U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines. Following a limited Midwest release in St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Chicago, the Ability Hand was officially launched nationwide in 2021, an achievement predicated on Aadeel’s early programming work at Loyola.

“On the technical side, we were programming microcontrollers,” Aadeel says. “I applied the programming skills I learned at Loyola to hardware, essentially. We started with a $20 microcontroller you can find online called Arduino. And then we just kept building on our skill sets.”

Soft robotics and the future of prosthetics

In glass cases in the San Diego office, prototypes of multiple generations of the Ability Hand—from the Mark I to Mark VIII—show the evolution of PSYONIC’s design and engineering approach across the past decade.

Users of prosthetic hands often complain that they break when bumped against furniture or household objects, Berlin says. With the release of the Mark V, PSYONIC introduced low-cost silicone and rubber materials to make the device’s fingers supple. Though soft and malleable, like human digits, the fingers are highly resilient to impact—a feature PSYONIC drives home in splashy videos on the company’s YouTube channel.

“I’ve arm wrestled Dan St. Pierre, a U.S. Paratriathlon National Champion, and lost. I’ve dropped it 30 feet from the roof of my house. I’ve stepped on it. We put it in a dryer for 10 minutes, and it survived,” Aadeel says.

The use of 3D-printed molds, in addition to refined finger development, has helped the company keep the device’s price between $10,000 and $20,000, all or part of this fee covered by Medicare or private insurers.

“For us, at PSYONIC, yes, we are pushing to make the most advanced technologically possible bionic limbs, but we also have to make them accessible because if they’re not accessible, then it defeats the entire purpose of everything that we’re trying to do,” Aadeel says.

So far that approach, an ethical imprint of his time at Loyola, appears to be working.

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