Project Lead — Afiyah Prosthetics
Led a 4-person team to prototype a myoelectric below-elbow prosthetic arm at £72 per unit — 95% cheaper than commercial alternatives — in a 24-hour hackathon.
At Haqqathon 2026 at Imperial College London I led a four-person multidisciplinary team to design and prototype a myoelectric below-elbow prosthetic arm, targeting amputees in conflict-affected and low-income communities.
The whole project was organised around one constraint: unit cost. We reached £72 per unit — around 95% cheaper than commercial alternatives. That number is the point of the project, not a footnote to it, because a prosthetic that the intended user cannot buy has not solved anything.
I designed the full hand assembly in Fusion 360: a modular five-finger mechanism in ABS with a parametric fit to stump geometry, and bolt-level replaceability throughout. That last decision matters more than it sounds — when a single finger fails on a conventional unit, the user replaces the whole arm. Here they replace the finger.
I integrated the electronics stack into a sub-£42 budget: EMG-based muscle sensing, haptic feedback, servo actuation with 5 kg lift capacity, Arduino Nano control, and a rechargeable 2000 mAh LiPo charged over USB-C.
We pitched to a judging panel at the end of the 24 hours and reached near-finalist stage. The feedback centred on scaling logistics and print-time transparency — fair criticism, and the honest gap between a working prototype and something that can actually be distributed at volume.