Dean Kamen

Dean Kamen, born on 5 April 1951 on Long Island, New York, is an American engineer, inventor and businessman, best known for inventing the Segway and the iBOT self-balancing wheelchair and for founding the non-profit organization FIRST with Woodie Flowers. He holds over 1,000 patents. After leaving Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1976 to work on the insulin pump AutoSyringe, he built a career around his companies, notably DEKA, which holds patents for portable dialysis machines, an insulin pump and the iBOT, and he founded Segway Inc. in 1999 to carry the self-balancing technology into non-medical uses. He has worked on a Stirling engine based power generator and the Slingshot water purifier, and DEKA developed the DEKA Arm prosthesis approved by the FDA in 2014. In 1989 he founded FIRST, whose robotics competition he created in 1992 with Woodie Flowers, and in 2017 he founded the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997.