The CEO and co-founder of Open Bionics believes that technology with “a little bit of creativity and playfulness can change people’s lives for the better”. And he uses open source design and 3D printing to achieve this.

Gibbard has pioneered a new way of making prosthetic arms with custom fitted bionic hands using 3D printing.

This not only reduces the cost of production it also opens up design possibilities which Gibbard believes can “remove the stigma associated with prosthetics by turning them into a positive talking point, for example the Iron Man, Frozen and Star Wars inspired prosthetics for children that they developed in cooperation with Disney”.

In another keynote presentation on the day, Richard Roberts, Academic Marketing Engineer will describe how engineering education is evolving to enable students to design complex systems, work effectively across multiple domains, and integrate new technologies.

There will also be presentations on software defined radio design, big data analysis and FPGA programming with LabView.

NIDays is a technology conference held by National Instruments, which takes place at the QE II Conference Centre in London on 29 November.