Sheffield Bionics

Sheffield Bionics is a student-led academic group at the University of Sheffield. Established in 2017 it offers students the opportunity to develop their engineering skills through the design and construction of bionic devices. Why? We are passionate about bionics and have been inspired by the tangible improvements made by groups like Open Bionics & Cybathlon. Our mission is to contribute into the bionics community and inspire more people along with us. How? We believe that the best way we can contribute is to help inspire our students to be similarly passionate about the field so that they will apply themselves and be able to make valuable contributions of their own in the future. Sheffield Bionics is allowing us to practice and learn about required skills and aspects of real engineering work that might be missing from academic teaching. What? We think that the best way to learn is through experience, consequentially our main goal this year is to develop and build three bionic devices: •A prosthetic arm •A prosthetic leg •A brain-computer interface •Hackcessible- a competition building assistive technology •NAKIO- Building prosthetics for animals •Bootcamp- Creating and hosting training sessions for all interested. Cybathlon 2020 The ambition for each build project is to produce a high quality product to enter into the Cybathlon comp, an international competition in Zurich that pits universities, prosthetics companies and hobbyists against a series of challenges designed to test the capabilities of their devices. Cybathlons key goals: •Promoting research, development and implementation of assistive technologies •Building a common platform for technology developers, people with disabilities, and the general public •Informing the public and stimulating discussion on inclusion and equality of people with disabilities in everyday life •Removing barriers between the general public, the users and the developers