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Koalaa Soft Prosthetic
Koalaa designs lightweight and usable prosthetics for people with limb difference. Their goal is to make prosthetics that are affordable, comfortable and readily available. Koalaa’s focus, from its start, has been to find out what people with limb difference really want and need by actually talking to and working with them. ABILITY’s George Kaplan met with Koalaa’s founder, Nate Macabuag, and consultant, Natalie Grazian, to talk about Koalaa’s history, innovations and what’s coming next. Grazian, an occupational therapist with below the arm limb difference, shares her experience of doing yoga and consulting with Koalaa on the prosthesis she uses.
George Kaplan: What inspired the need for Koalaa [Soft Prosthetics]?
Nate Macabuag: Oh, gosh! It generally was a complete accident. It was not the plan to start a com- pany. I wanted an easy life,
George. (laughter)
Macabuag: I was in uni (university) doing a mechanical engineering degree. And as per your degree, you get into a team of students, and you work on a project for a whole year. We basically got reject- ed for the projects we applied for as a team of students. So, we had a choice. We could either pick the dregs of the projects no one else wanted to pick, or we could compose our own one. I went, “This is a great opportunity to basically get the uni to pay us,”–because you get a thousand pounds funding– “to do whatever the hell we want for a year. Let’s just build an ironman suit and trick them
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