My left foot is doing this movement, so it's pulling up and back and it's proportional so I can go fast or slow.

And then my right toe is doing this, pulling across.

The third thumb is an augmentation device designed by Dani Claude to enhance the function of the hand.

There's so much of this future tech coming out and we're seeing a lot of work where it's tested on people, but to be tested on one or two people is the commonality.

Sometimes we have a group of ten people might be tested on, but even when they are tested on this larger group of ten, which still isn't much, it tends to be a very specific group of people.

So for example, young people, normally university students, often men, which really isn't covering the broadest scope of people who could be using and engaging with these technologies.

Together with the Plasticity Lab at Cambridge University, the team was looking for an opportunity to study how different people respond to this novel technology.

An amazing opportunity came up to be part of the prestigious Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in 2022, and this was this incredible opportunity to put this device in front of thousands of people and get them to experience it for the first time.

So we were able to get a huge amount of diverse users very quickly over the five days of the exhibition.

We were really interested in this research at looking at how good are people initially picking up that initial motor skill.

So in the first few moments of usage, can they really use the third thumb?

We tell them how to control it, we quickly explain how to do a task, and then we said, off you go, do it.

Very good, you see?

98% of our nearly 600 participants were able to perform the task.

We were surprised by just how good everyone was, particularly in the exhibition setting, but also the broad age range we have, really young children to older adults, and everyone could perform the task well.

When you grow up with two hands, ten fingers, this is kind of quite weird.

It's very different to kind of learning how to use a whole prosthetic arm.

Any kind of tool we learn to use in our daily lives requires a little bit of training and experience within the context of our day.

The thumb is no different, but what's really exciting about the thumb is it seems quite complex from the beginning, and it's really not.

And that's what we're showing in this study, is that people can quickly, easily use it within one minute, which is really exciting.

It doesn't take years of training, or even months, or even days.

In future we'd really like to work with kids, especially kids with upper limb difference, and that's something we're working towards with the lab.

And so, working with kids, you've got to pick up their attention span really quickly.

We wanted to make something that is just absolutely able to be used in the first minute.

From this study, the main takeaway is really thinking about how we can be inclusive in our testing of new technologies, and a more iterative design process based on this testing.

So that's the main thing we want to employ in the community, is thinking more about this design testing in large, diverse ranges of users.

More specifically for the third thumb, we've now tested it in these large, diverse groups of healthy users.

We also want to now look at people with more motor disabilities and motor impairments.

So how can we be more inclusive in the third thumb design, so it's useful for these groups of people?

For example, if you've had a stroke.

How can it be used, and how can we adapt the design, so it's optimal for them?

If you'd like to learn more about how the third thumb works, please check out some of these previous videos.

Thank you.