It’s LimbBo Adventure Day 2024!

With over 640 registered attendees, yesterday was the annual LimbBo Adventure Day! 

In its 6th year, the annual LimbBo Adventure day was hosted by the LimbBo foundation, a charity that supports children and families with limb differences. 

From archery to zumba, the day was packed with fun activities for kids to explore. Held at the spacious Cawthorne Cricket Club, families had a chance to catch-up, try new things, and celebrate everything that makes this event so loved by both parents and children.

We caught up with existing Hero Arm users, including Josh, who paused a family camping trip to volunteer at the event, and Lottie, who shared some practical features she’d like to see in the Hero Arm to help improve her drawing skills. We also met a few kiddos who were booked in for rebuilds just in time for the new school year.

While some were more shy than others when it came to playing around with bionic tech, it didn’t take long for the kids to grasp how their muscles controlled the bionic arm sensors. And very quickly kids were throwing bionic fist bumps, pinches, and high-fives.

More focus was given to the bionic arm design and colouring station, where kids pondered important decisions about the superpowers a bionic arm could hold. “A laser would be quite useful”, one child suggested, “A Turtle Ninja warrior armour layer,” another chimed in. We’ve compiled a list as long as an arm (pun intended) to take back to our engineers.

Here are a few designs we loved. Unfortunately, some were lost to a sudden rainstorm that drenched the cricket grounds. We tried to save as many designs as we could, but if yours isn’t below, or you didn’t get a chance to take part, you can download the colouring sheet and re-submit it here.

While kids flexed their creative skills and fuelled their ideas with chocolates and sweets, parents had questions about the progress Open Bionics is making to make bionic tech more accessible.

Due to recent NHS policy changes, the journey to getting a Hero Arm has become more accessible. However, with over 240 trusts and 40 enablement centres around the country, our clinical team has a huge undertaking to train all appropriate NHS teams to confidently measure, cast, and fit Hero Arms. One of our prosthetists, Helder, travelled over 500 miles in 48 hours—coming fresh from NHS training in Kent to meet with families at LimbBo and then back to the clinic in Bristol for patient consultation appointments. Here’s the advice Helder had for families looking to get a Hero Arm through the NHS:

We want to extend a huge THANK YOU to Jane and the entire LimbBo Foundation team for putting on an Adventure Day that truly felt like a family gathering. This safe space allowed everyone to exchange ideas for adaptations, show off skills, catch up and play in complete confidence, all while enjoying the best of British summer.

We made so many new friends and reunited with old ones, and already can’t wait for 2025 👀