Kiwi company behind bionic man

  • Breaking
  • 16/02/2013

The world's first bionic man has been unveiled for a television documentary in the UK, and it's a New Zealand firm who helped get the project off the ground.

The world's first bionic man is incredibly lifelike, with synthetic blood, robotic limbs and artificial organs. What people might not realise is that the super human, called Rex, is also half Kiwi.

“It was a million-dollar US project and we provided the legs to allow it to get up and walk,” says Rex Bionics founder Richard Little.

Rex Bionics has been helping people like Jarad Pearce get back on their feet for the past five years.

“I took it back down home and walked into the local pub, and a lot of the old farmers were all teary eyed seeing me standing up and walking around again,” says Mr Pearce.

And now the company's bionic legs are helping to showcase the rest of the human body in ways that have never been seen before.

“A big one was a skull implant,” says Rex Bionics engineer Faisal Almesfer. “With a lot of soldiers coming back with missing bits of jaw and missing bits of skull, that's something the bionic man had – a jaw and a skull implant.”

There are 28 different body parts that function like the real thing.

"It means now that if your kidney fails there's a bionic one,” says Mr Almesfer. “You don't have to wait on the transplant list.”

But it's a project that never would have got off the ground without the help of Rex Bionics.

“We produce the only self-supporting robotic exoskeleton in the world,” says Mr Little. “Therefore it's the only device that could help their bionic man get up and walk.”

Rex was put together for a television documentary in the UK to show how far prosthetic science has advanced.

“We had a massive crowd in London in Knightsbridge, and as the bionic man stood up out from the taxi and walked into Harrods, there was just a phenomenal reaction,” says Mr Almesfer.

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source: newshub archive