Saku is a 37-year-old male with distal phalanx amputations of the index and middle fingers. His injury occurred in 2011 while repairing his motorcycle at home. After the initial surgery, Saku underwent amputation revision surgeries to reconstruct the finger and remove the nail horns. Saku’s primary struggle in returning to work and function was with hypersensitivity.

Saku works at Microsoft as a communications manager and his amputations and accompanying hypersensitivity impacted his ability to type with accuracy and with speed. What he thought was a minor injury turned out to severely affect his ability to perform his job duties. He expressed surprise at this impairment, stating, “Having a lot of typos and having a slow typing speed impacted how I worked more so than I ever imagined it would.” His primary concern was with job performance.

Saku received two PIPDrivers™, custom-designed for his residual features and anatomic measurements for an intimate fit and intuitive articulation. The PIPDriver™ is driven off of his functional PIP joints, and actuates an artificial DIP joint and distal phalanx. The PIPDriver™ restores length, dexterity, and function, and protects the hypersensitive residuum. Saku has been wearing his PIPDrivers™ for almost four years as of early 2019. He wears them daily and considers them mandatory for most daily tasks that he performs. Saku has been able to return to his pre-injury typing speed, and is able to get a full comprehensive grip on objects used in ADL, such as his phone, eating utensils, and mail.

He states, “I can’t tell you how much it pleases me to be able to type like normal, to be able to pick things up, and to even do small tasks, like sort through my mail and paper. It sounds like a task that everybody takes for granted, but once you lose it, you really value it and to regain it is amazing.”

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