In the basement of a house in Burien, Peregrine Hawthorn shows me his three hands dangling from a chord. He loves them. He assembled them himself. They look like robot hands.
The components of each hand were made by a 3-D printer for about $50 with the help of an organization called E-NABLE. This is much cheaper than a high tech prosthetic hand which can cost more than $100,000.
Hawthorn, who is in his early 20s, calls one of the hands that dangles from the line the "Cyborg Beast."
“It’s not the strongest hand I’ve ever used,” Peregrine said.
When Peregrine straps it onto his wrist and flexes down, tendons made out of fishing line tighten and all of the large boxy fingers close shut. He calls another hand he put together the "Raptor."
“This right here is kind of a staple hand that we give to most people right now. This one works pretty well,” he said.
From the time he was little, Peregrine was hardwired to be left handed. But his left hand could never hold onto whatever it was he was after: a toy, a book, a treat. He’d reach for it but couldn’t grasp it.
This is because Peregrine's left hand has never had fingers. Since birth, it’s a palm with five little fleshy nubs.
Today his left hand moves ladders and rips blackberries from the ground thanks to his latest model, the Talon. Its black fingers are shiny. Peregrine used a vegetable steamer to bathe it in acetone. The fingers close without a squeak thanks to the beeswax that was rubbed into the joints.
“And unlike all the other models it uses leather,” Peregrine said, “There’s no plastic or foam that touches my skin at all. It’s conformed to the shape of my arm, the shape of my hand. I even managed to get a little embossing on the top, cyborg pride. I view myself as a cyborg now. It’s become a part of my body and part of my identity.”
Peregrine has his own 3-D printer the size of a breadbox. He talks online with prosthetic designers all over the world about how to make these hands better. On this day he’s getting ready to print some replacement fingers. He sprays some Aquanet on tray so the plastic will stay in one spot. The printing time will take 11 hours and 35 minutes.
In Peregrine’s cramped, messy room the bed is in the corner, inches away from his desk and computer. Old 3-D printing projects sit on a shelf. One of them is a white Tyrannosaurus rex skull a little bigger than a softball. It’s supposed to screw onto a shower head so the water shoots out of its mouth.
Shelves are filled with books. Poster art and prints of Japanese landscapes cover the walls. Peregrine shuts all of this out. He’s laser focused on his work. He wasn’t always this way. A few years ago he was one of those students that teachers said had lots of potential but didn’t apply themselves.
If you asked him what he wanted to do with his life he said ‘everything’ and then did nothing. Now, when Peregrine looks down at his E-NABLE hand, the Talon, the desire to tinker and improve extends to the rest of his life.
“When you think about updating part of yourself, you start to look at your entire self as something that is worthy of being upgraded and you see yourself as a work in progress. Anything you can’t do today isn't because you can't do it, it’s because you can’t do it yet. A future version of you could do that if you work at upgrading and improving yourself.” says Peregrine.
Inside a lab at the University of Washington Bothell campus, a bank of 3-D printers is humming along one wall. This is where 30 students work in teams to make the 3-D printed hand more lifelike.
Cameron Ramsay Whalen, a 23-year-old mechanical engineer major, is figuring out how to make it possible for people who wear them to really feel what they are touching. It involves strapping an ultrasound band to a person’s chest across the pectoral muscles.
“It would be a chest strap,” explains Whalen.
A small blue-tooth device would wirelessly send signals from the hand to the chest. This would only work for people who once a hand with fingers and then lost it somehow, perhaps an accident or cancer. The sound waves from the ultrasound would tickle the nerves that were severed and wake them up.
“You’d have your prosthetic hand that had sensors that can emit signals that are directly related to the amount of pressure being applied to the finger,” says Whalen, “Those signals are relayed to ultrasonic transducers, that when fed an electrical signal will produce sound waves. Those sound waves can penetrate the skin and engage nerves at depth in the tissue.”
Other students are designing a rotating wrist. Another team is trying to make it so the thumb on the 3-D printed hand can be put in different positions.
One child who is waiting for a better thumb on his plastic hand is 13-year-old Dawson Riverman in Forest Grove, Oregon. Forest Grove is in the rolling farmland west of Portland.
Like Peregrine, Dawson has a left palm, but no fingers. He’d love it if the thumb on his plastic hand had a little dexterity to work a joystick when he plays his favorite video game, Destiny.
“Like the buttons I can’t just grab them with all four fingers because it doesn’t work very well and the thumb doesn’t work the joystick very well at all,” says Dawson, a shy teen with short brown hair and big brown eyes.
The hand may be clunky for video games, but there’s a lot of other things it makes it possible for Dawson to do. Now he can play basketball.
“I’m good at using it for dribbling and shooting,” says Dawson after shooting hoops with his brother in their backyard.
He uses it for soccer when he’s goalie. He can ride his bike with two hands on the handlebars. Dawson is a growing boy. He’s going on his third hand. His mother, Dawn Riverman, remembers when they came home with the first one.
“He was so excited,” remembers Dawn, “He ran over to the neighbors and was showing it to them, showing them what it did then I heard, ‘Mom, Mom, come here!’ and he goes, ‘I can pick up a bat with two hands.’ For the first time he was able to hold it with two hands.”
Dawn says this inexpensive piece of plastic has changed her son’s life. Yes, he was able to get around fine before the hand, but now, for the first time he has something other kids want, but can’t have. It’s that cyborg appeal that’s now part of Peregrine’s identity.
Pre-Cyborg, Peregrine was so ambivalent about school he didn’t bother going to his high school graduation. Today he’s studying calculus online. He gets up and goes for a runs in the morning.
“Not something I use to do, ever,” says Peregrine, who almost doesn’t believe himself and his new habits, “If you saw me running down a street it was because someone was chasing me”
He wants to go to Rochester Institute of Technology in New York to study bio-mechanical engineering.
“They said I didn’t get accepted in.”
But the updated version of Peregrine isn’t letting that stop him. He’s moving to New York State, where he’ll go to community college, get some traction and then reapply. He continues to improve and test the E-NABLE 3-D printed hand, which so far has been paired with more than 1,000 people around the world.
Peregrine says he's prepared, "To go full iron man with this.”
Future models of the hand still in the works are the Falcon, the Kestrel and the Osprey. Maybe it will be Peregrine who comes up with the perfect design that will make it possible for Dawson to clean up when he plays Destiny.
