Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
Claudia Mitchell went to Iraq as a United States Marine, and came home safely to Arkansas. That's when she decided to learn to ride a motorcycle—and how a highway accident severed her left arm. At age 23, she had to learn the most basic tasks all over again.
In a magazine article, Claudia saw a groundbreaking prosthetic limb created at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. "I called the hospital and asked who I could talk to about getting an arm of my own," she recalls. Claudia was teamed with Dr. Todd Kuiken, director of the Neural Engineering Center for Bionic Medicine at RIC. His team equipped Claudia with a new motorized arm that responds to nerve signals. Tying her shoes, ironing shirts, baking a cake—the skills she'd once taken for granted were back in her grasp.
through Claudia Mitchell's eyes.
Today Claudia is giving back to the science that changed her life. She travels regularly to Chicago to participate in experiments with RIC researchers, as they develop the next generation of prosthetics. Claudia's perspective is irreplaceable, as her everyday life provides constant experiments and challenges to the state of the art.
"When I first came up here, it was all about me," Mitchell says. "I wanted an arm that worked for me. But being part of the process where there's research and learning, it became a part of making something better for people that come after me. That next 23-year-old girl who loses her arm, and is so frustrated when she tries to iron a shirt that she breaks down in tears."
Read the New Yorker article featuring Claudia's contributions to research at RIC.
