Esper Bionics: prosthetic pioneers

With a focus on mechatronics, artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT, Esper Bionics is a pioneering company in the engineering space. Leading this team of pioneers is Founder and CEO Dima Gazda, who explains how involved he is in many aspects of the company while it’s in its early stages.

“However, thanks to our great team, I can dedicate a lot of my time to strategy and planning, only engaging in the hardest tasks when it comes to execution,” he explains.

Esper Bionics is an augmentation start-up, currently developing robotic limb prostheses and controllers for people who have lost their hands. The prosthetic has moveable fingers, is 3x faster in control, is light and safe, and also has five different sizes, while being natural in shape and moving in a similar fashion to an arm.

“We believe that the prosthetics industry will become a birthplace of technologies that will give people extra abilities, eliminate diseases, and help billions of humans live longer and more fulfilling lives in a diverse world. That’s why, currently, we are focusing our efforts on this industry. We have started with developing robotic limb prostheses and controllers for people who have lost their hands,” comments Gazda.

“At Esper, we are giving people back their self-confidence, functionality, hope, and opportunities,” he adds.

Esper believes that human capacity and abilities are underestimated. The company aims to unleash these abilities by building technologies that can eliminate diseases, give humans extra abilities, and, ultimately, fulfil and prolong the lives of billions of people around the globe.

This mission is founded on the knowledge that the prosthetics industry is well and truly in need of a major upgrade, as Gazda explains: “The majority of prostheses that amputees use today are purely cosmetic with no functionality whatsoever. Even those more advanced versions that allow the performance of the simplest tasks are very limited in their abilities.”

“We at Esper have created the hand prosthesis Esper Hand that not only allows amputees to perform most everyday tasks — from cutting an apple to applying makeup —  but can be customised to the individual needs of the user, predict the user’s behaviour and move intuitively. The more you use it, the better at understanding your intentions it gets. That’s a big step forward,” he enthuses.

Gazda believes that his company is truly unique as it is the “only company focused on the ‘brain’ of the prosthesis, its improvement over time, and its development alongside users. Imagine if your hand could upgrade over time to match your personality, tastes, wardrobe, skillset, and career.”

The Esper Hand is much more functional, with up to 3x faster control than other hand prostheses available on the market.

“It is also beautifully designed after a human hand. In June 2022, the hand won the Best of the Best Award 2022 in Product Design from Red Dot, one of the biggest design competitions in the world,” notes Gazda.

Currently, Esper Bionics is focused primarily on the US hand prostheses market, and its goal is to make Esper Hand the most popular hand prosthesis in the US. Once it has achieved this goal, the company plans to expand into the EU and several other markets, develop prostheses for other parts of the arm, partner with other prostheses vendors to enhance their devices and cooperate with the developers of electronic implants.

The company has three debut products: The Esper Hand, a bionic self-learning hand prosthesis; Esper Control, a non-invasive wearable brain-computer interface; and Esper Platform, a cloud-based software solution to individualise the control of wearables.