KARACHI: Friends of Burns Centre has launched Bioniks prosthetics for amputees. 

Thanks to the work of the Friends of Burns Centre, people who have lost limbs can now get Bioninks prostheses.

The first time a robotic arm was used to fix a prosthetic arm on a burn victim whose arm had to be cut off. This could help more burn victims get better care and help so they can get back to their normal lives.

In 2004, the "Friends of Burns Centre - Patient Welfare Society" and the Ministry of Health, Government of Sindh worked together to open the Burns Centre at Dr K.M. Ruth Pfau Civil Hospital in Karachi as a model Public-Private Partnership project.

The Burns Centre is a care centre for people who have been burned. It has 66 beds and gives each burn victim the best possible medical care and operational services for free.

Burns always cause a lot of pain, has a high death rate, take a long time to heal, are very expensive to treat, and most burn victims are poor, among other things. Even if individuals get better, they might have a deformity or disability for the rest of life.

In addition to giving the burn victims the best medical care possible, consultants are also helping them recover in many ways. One of these ways is by providing prosthetics to people who have lost limbs.

But unfortunately, Burns Centre did not have any prosthetics that could help people who had lost limbs. 

It was their most important and urgent project, and it could help professionals to treat burn patients better and help them recover.

They tried to find prosthetics suppliers and found a local company called BIONIKS. It was run by a few young engineers who had made prosthetic arms with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help move the hands and give the user more control over everyday tasks.

It was hoped that their prosthetics and the counselling they give to help the patients would help them get over the trauma and boost their self-esteem. This, in turn, would make a big difference in the kind of help we could give from the Burns Centre. This will also help move toward having enough money to live on.

The Burns Centre team had been working with Bioniks to come up with consulting solutions based on what each institution knew best. 

After talking about it, the Bioniks started working with 10-year-old Abdullah Ahmed in the Pediatric Ward, who had lost an arm and was ready for a prosthetic. 

Abdullah Ahmed was the first person in the Friends of Burns Centre's New Chapter of Patient Care Programme to get a robotic prosthetic arm.