Greek start-up OpenBionics was the first prize winner of the 2015 Robotdalen International Innovation Award for its Prosthetic Hand concept, awarded at a ceremony in Västerås, Sweden on September 3rd.
The competition targets innovators -entrepreneurs, researchers, inventors, start-ups, robot developers, graduate or postgraduate students- with commercially valid robotics solutions, aiming to further develop and commercialize their innovative robotics ideas.

According to the jury, the "OpenBionics Prosthetic Hand" concept appears as a rather well-developed concept that has a great potential in gaining competitive edge in the market as a product’, while Peter Stany, Innovation Driver at Robotdalen, noted that "it is in line with our focus on new technical solutions for health care and complies with our efforts to develop what we call Technology for Independent Life".

OpenBionics, an open-source initiative for the development of affordable, light-weight, modular robot hands and prosthetic devices easily reproduced using off-the-shelf materials, was created at the National Technical University of Athens by researchers Minas Liarokapis, Agisilaos Zisimatos, Christoforos Mavrogiannis and George Kontoudis. Robotdalen is a Swedish innovation cluster enabling commercial success of robotics and automation.