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

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

It 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 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 saw 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 stilled 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 so