Samantha Payne facts for kids

Samantha Joanne Payne is an amazing English entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who starts and runs a business. Samantha is the co-founder of a company called Open Bionics. This company creates special, affordable robotic body parts, called prosthetics, especially for children.

Samantha has won many international awards for her incredible work. Some of these include being named an 'Innovator under 35' by MIT Technology Review in 2018. She also received the James Dyson award for her innovative engineering and was a Wired Innovation Fellow in 2016. In 2020, she was given an MBE award by the Queen. This honor was for her efforts in making bionic technology easier for everyone to access.

Early Life and Learning

Samantha Payne grew up in a place called Knowle West, near Bristol, England. She went to Whitworth University and earned a degree there.

Starting Her Career

Before starting her own company, Samantha worked as a journalist. She focused on writing about technology. In 2013, as a journalist, she met Joel Gibbard. Joel was a robotics expert. They soon became business partners and decided to create something new together.

Founding Open Bionics

In 2014, Samantha and Joel officially started Open Bionics. Their company began in a special place for new technology businesses at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Their main goal was to make "affordable, assistive devices that enhance the human body." This means they wanted to create helpful, low-cost robotic parts that could improve people's lives.

Open Bionics has even teamed up with Disney! Together, they make cool prosthetics for kids that look like characters from Disney movies. Samantha's work at Open Bionics has been featured in big newspapers like The Guardian and Daily Mirror.

How They Innovate

Open Bionics uses very modern technology to create their prosthetics. They use 3D scanning to get the perfect measurements for each person's body. Then, they use 3D printing to build the prosthetic parts.

These methods make the process much faster and cheaper. It means that personalized robotic hands can be made without costing a lot of money. Samantha says that a bionic hand with many moving parts might cost up to £60,000 from other companies. But Open Bionics can make a similar one for around £5,000! This makes these amazing devices much more available to people who need them.

Awards and Special Recognition

Samantha Payne has received many honors for her groundbreaking work.

• In 2015, she was a finalist for the 'Young Entrepreneur of The Year' award in Women in Business.
• In 2018, Forbes magazine included her on their "30 Under 30" list. This list highlights 30 important people under 30 years old in the Sciences and Healthcare field.