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Prosthetics

Iron Man, Elsa help kids with prostheses feel like heroes

Mary Bowerman
USA TODAY Network
Open Bionics teamed with The Walt Disney Company to create bionic arms that look like they belong to superheroes.

Many prosthetic limbs are designed to blend in, but a U.K. based prosthetic company is taking the opposite approach.

Open Bionics teamed with The Walt Disney Company to create bionic hands that look like they belong to a superhero.

The company created three prosthetics based on Iron Man, Elsa from Frozen and one that resembles a lightsaber from Star Wars, according to a statement from Open Bionics.

What kid wouldn't want something that looked like this?

"We've already had several requests for the lightsaber from people who aren't kids," Joel Gibbard, a British robotics engineer working on the prosthetics, told The Independent.

The company can produce low-cost bionic hands using 3-D printing. The Disney themed prosthetics will likely cost under $3,000 and be available by the end of 2016; Gibbard told The Independent.

Instead of doing "boring physical therapy," the bionic hands allow kids to feel like they are training "to become super heroes," according to the company.

"All of a sudden they're not being asked how they lost their hand, they're being asked where they got their cool robot hand, how does it feel, and how does it work?" Gibbard told The Independent.

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