About Jessica Smith
Jessica Smith, ex-Paralympian, retired from the field at 22 after seven years as a competitive swimmer for the Australian team. These days, she’s a children’s book author and motivational public speaker who advocates for a more inclusive environment for people of determination around the world through TOUCH Dubai. Throughout her career, she has won multiple awards, the most recent being the Medal of the Order of Australia, one of Australia’s highest honors.
The following blog post covers lessons learned from Jessica’s keynote at our Annual General Meeting held in March 2023.
Navigating the cards you’re dealt with
Born without a left arm, Jessica is no stranger to discrimination and feeling like the odd one out. Throughout her childhood, she felt that the people around her thought of her as inferior to able-bodied individuals, which made her feel less capable and incomplete. This is not uncommon to what the majority of disabled individuals face and feel. In fact, Jessica truly believes that an unfriendly social environment and discrimination from others are more disabling than a person’s actual disability. This guided her future career to strive to empower equality amongst disabled people around on a societal level and not just medical.
Despite the strife, Jessica was able to power through life and work harder, landing on Australia’s national Paralympic team. But even then, she says, there was still a lot of discrimination in sports for people with disabilities at the time.
Her family encouraged her feats, but offered her a balance of realism and tough love, telling her that sometimes she’d have to work more to achieve the same as her abled peers, as society was not built for someone like her. The pressure was on — juggling balance sports, academics, and the development of social skills. Still, she didn’t want to settle for mediocrity, she wanted to be the best.
Jessica’s early experience with machine
Despite the cards that Jessica was dealt, she did not opt for disability aid. While aids may not always be necessary or desired, sometimes, they are an important facet of the disabled community. For Jessica, not using a prosthetic was a choice, albeit one based on a formative childhood experience.
At age one, she was fitted with a traditional prosthetic arm. Not only did it take multiple months for her to get used to it, but its basic design caused her to accidentally spill a kettle of boiling water without realizing it in time, resulting in third-degree burns. For the next couple of years, she was in and out of the hospital, and this experience swore her off prosthetics for decades.
While disability aids can be life-changing for many individuals, limited innovation can prevent many individuals from benefiting from disability aids. Jessica was traumatized by the event, such that she was unsure of using a prosthetic well into adulthood. It was only when she was approached by Covvi, a prosthetics manufacturer, to participate in a patient advocacy program that she could finally overcome her trauma.
“For me, the time was right, but so too was the technology.” Jessica Smith
This could be the case for many people of determination, who do not have other options to their aid except for the primitive ones widely available. While not always a problem, the lack of choice can be a hindrance after a bad experience, especially if the aid could be a contributing factor to their standard of living.
Embracing machine technology in healthcare
Jessica is currently a patient advocate, and her prosthetic (or shall we say bionic, arm) is much more flexible and adaptable. It transmits neural signals into physical movements more or less directly. Technically, the human body works by transmitting neural signals to different parts of the body through the nervous system. Her bionic arm functions similarly — she has to think of a movement, sending signals to the muscles connected to her bionic arm, which are read by the computer at the base of the bionic hand that turns that thought into a movement. On the more futuristic side, an app on her phone allows her to control different gestures and groups of gestures, along with their speed and force.
This is revolutionary in the prosthetic sphere. It’s almost like the bionic prosthetics seen in science fiction, where the bionic limb acts as just another extension of the human body, controlled via a single thought.
Prosthetics and society
From a societal perspective, Jessica’s experience with the bionic arm has been positive as well. It promotes her in a different light than a regular prosthetic or without one. Having suffered ignorance and ableist rhetoric from society firsthand, and secondhand via her children as they experience teasing and bullying from their peers, it was empowering for her to feel something positive with regard to her disability. She has been called “cool” and “half robot” (positively) by children. In her own words, people are “no longer afraid… they are intrigued”.
Jessica witnessed what a difference her bionic arm could have on societal expectations. It has shifted the lens through which society sees her. This intrigue and positivity represent a much-needed shift in society. While differences exist and cannot always be ignored, they can be taken in stride without fear and negativity. All this to say: her bionic prosthetic shows that technology could be the answer.
The need for acceleration in healthcare
The field of prosthetics and disability aid is a slow-moving one. There is potential for both users and creators to profit, since the disability community has a disposable income of eight to thirteen trillion dollars untapped due to a lack of resources and advancement on the technology side. At DFDF, we believe in the Future of Health as one of our Future Economies thematic pillars, and invest directly in startups that are driving change in this field and funds that are providing the capital for others to make these strides.
From Jessica, we can learn about the power that specific technologies can bring about the joy each innovation and advancement can have on humanity about the importance of having an industry that’s just as adaptable to change and innovation as any other.
Lessons learned from Jessica on how man can embrace machine
We can also learn about our own biases and how to overcome them. Jessica stated that when she was younger, she came about expecting others to tolerate her and her biases before she was willing to accept others for theirs. While this was probably a natural side effect of her young age at the time, some people may still not have grown out of that mindset and come about expecting to think of themselves in an entirely different boat instead of, say, one boat where everyone is not equipped with all the same items.
We can learn that we can become advocates for change at any point in our lives. Jessica, understandably, refused to opt for prosthetics for most of her life. While that was her valid opinion, she cannot refute her responsibility as one of the most popular and outspoken people in the disabled community. It’s not a stretch to say that this might have discouraged some people from asking for disability accommodation due to the “If she can do it, so can I” mentality.
There is no blame on Jessica, but it is a natural psychological response. So it is even more beautiful seeing her decide to try out something that, while she has never needed herself, could do wonders for at least one person in the disabled community. And her changing her, unofficial, stance encourages those who did not need aid previously, to seek it out with confidence.
It doesn’t matter if we were of a different opinion before. Human beings are constantly evolving, “the only constant… is change”. There is no shame or guilt associated with a change in mindset or opinion. Life happens and new facts arise or feelings change. While we try not to become slaves to the status quo, we must not forget that we can just as easily become slaves to past ideas and opinions, ours or someone else’s… but we are no longer in the past. We are not the same person. We are new people, we know more, have learned different things, we are different now.