The CTO Podcast · Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation

Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, PSYONIC's Visionary: Transforming Lives Through Advanced Bionic Prosthetics and Entrepreneurial Innovation

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Juan Suquillo said a part of him had come back after pinching with his left hand again.

Etienne de Bruin opens the show by introducing Dr. Adil Akhtar and Psionic, the bionic hand company. The tone stays light at first, with a practical curiosity about the product itself. They ask why the hand has five fingers. They also ask which finger gets used the most and which finger is the hardest to make work well. From there, the episode moves into the bigger technical and business picture behind advanced prosthetics. Akhtar explains how an early encounter with limb difference changed the way he thought about access, healthcare, and opportunity. He describes seeing someone with the same ethnic heritage but a vastly different quality of life. That moment pushed him toward a field where engineering and medicine could meet. He talks about studying biology at Loyola Chicago. He adds a master's degree in computer science. He also points to the nearby Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, now the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, as a major influence. The lab's work on nerve-powered prosthetics and nerve rewiring opened up a path that felt both technically interesting and personally meaningful. Akhtar says he wanted to build things, but he did not want to give up the engineering side by becoming only an MD. He keeps coming back to the idea that the best prosthetics combine multiple disciplines. The conversation touches on government-funded research, DARPA, and the role of serious institutional support in moving the field forward. He then walks through more of his academic path, including electrical and computer engineering and neuroscience. The episode also covers the challenge of taking a company from early scrappiness to a form that institutions can trust. That means product development, robotics progress, and business credibility all have to move together. Etienne keeps the conversation moving without flattening it, letting Akhtar explain the work in plain language. The result is a conversation that treats a bionic hand as both a technical system and a deeply human tool. The episode closes with a sense that the company is still building, still learning, and still trying to make advanced prosthetics more accessible.

As heard by us

A bionic hand story that stays close to the product and the person behind it.

The episode tracks Dr. Adil Akhtar and Psionic through a practical set of questions: why the hand has five fingers, which finger people prefer most, and which one is hardest to build.

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Why you'd press play

You want the real story behind building a bionic hand company.

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