Unfortunately, we don't do great with upper limb prosthetics.

The problem is that current prosthetics don't work very well.

Or we can create very specific prosthetics for that individual.

At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics.

So it's different from the motor prosthetics where you're communicating from the brain to a device.

So we can run this through to something like prosthetics, which is highly specialized to an individual's handicap.

And now both of these can climb better, move faster, swim differently with their prosthetics than us normal abled persons.

And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh and bone legs,

It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important.

Implicit in this phrase of overcoming adversity is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability.