David Aguilar, Innovating with LEGO to overcome disability

My name is David Aguilar, I'm 22 and I hold the record for being the first to build a

fully functioning prosthetic Lego arm. I was born with Poland Syndrome, it's a genetic disease that affects only one person out of 20,000

At first it might feel like it's not useful but I use it every day on different things

like working, doing stuff at the gym, building Lego. And when I was young I suffered from bullying from some of my classmates and yeah I can

say it was pretty hard being the different one. Four years ago I was laying in my bed and I was kind of bored so I took a look at my

room and I saw this Lego helicopter that was sitting on my desk and I decided to dismantle it

This single brick was used to make my first prosthetic out of Lego Technic

It's very simple actually, once I pull my elbow up the fingers close because there are

some airline headphones that I wanted to reuse and give them another purpose and the mechanism

is as simple as this. I don't need something very fancy working like mechanically, just to move the simpler

part of the prosthetic which is the front and then right here as I told before there's

this like mountain that fits into my hand valley and when I close this little screw

you can see the whole section fits to my arm as tight as possible and once I start hearing

like a click, okay that means that there's no more room inside and the prosthetic can

be steeled and I can move it on my own. The only limitation that I had with my first prosthetic was that I only used one Lego set

and this is why I don't have this challenge anymore because on my computer I designed

my prosthetics in a digital software called Studio and after that I can order the bricks

and I can build something that I had on my computer a few weeks ago