As an audience of 250 students and visitors waited eagerly in Half Hollow Hills High School East auditorium, a six-foot tall man walked out onto the stage, reports Long Island Newsday.  Though the man could walk, talk, hear, breathe, and think, the man was an unusual site because he was the “Incredible Real Bionic Man.”  His body is completely composed of bionic body parts and implantable synthetic organs.

In 2011, a team of engineers, led by Richard Walker and Matthew Godden, of the London-based robotics company Shadow Robot Company, came up with the concept of building a bionic man.  He would be designed with a pumping heart and other critical human components, including ankles, feet, a lung, ears, a pancreas and a kidney, utilizing $1 million worth of advanced limbs and organs from laboratories and manufacturers.

According to The Associated Press, the bionic man was made of parts from 17 different manufacturers.  In fact, the robot has about 60 to 70 percent of the function of a human. It can step, sit, and stand with the help of a Rex walking machine that is already used by people who have lost the ability to walk due to a spinal injury.  The bionic man also has a functioning heart that, using an electronic pump, beats and circulates artificial blood, which carries oxygen just like human blood. An artificial, implantable kidney, meanwhile, functions similar to a modern dialysis unit.

The face of the bionic man prototype was modeled after Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who was born without a left arm below the elbow and has the same prosthetic hand as the bionic man.  Meyer points out that nearly every part seen on the robot was not available five years ago.  After seeing so much recent advancement in artificial science, this team was inspired to create the bionic man.  They wanted to see what it would be like to put all of the most advanced prosthetic human body parts from around the world into one place to create a bionic man.

Despite his advanced nature, the robot is made of parts that still have a long way to go before they can be used in humans.  For example, the kidney is still a prototype and it may be awhile before it can be implanted in humans.  Also, the bionic man is missing some key human organs and functions.  For example, there is no skin, liver, digestive system, or brain.  He does, however, have a face because the research team wanted to show that there are aesthetic prostheses for people who have lost parts of their faces.