It’s the Hero he deserves.

For most of his life, Praveen Gowtham avoided prosthetics.

The Bronx physicist, who lost part of his arm at one week old due to a birth defect, found artificial limbs cumbersome, clunky and less mobile than billed.

That all changed last month when he became the world’s first person to be outfitted with Open Bionics’ new 3D-printed Hero FLEX robot arm, a cutting-edge attachment for above-elbow amputees.

Within an hour of the procedure, the Bronx-based scientist, 43, was accomplishing tasks he rarely did with previous prosthetics — like holding his dog’s leash, or opening drink containers unaided for the first time.

“I can hold a bottle and then torque it the other way,” Gowtham told The Post. “That makes a huge, huge difference, and I’ve already noticed that.”

The device can even give someone the finger, revealed Gowtham, who went from wearing prosthetics for at most a half-hour per day to donning this cybernetic enhancement nearly full-time.

Released just last month, the Hero FLEX is the first above-elbow socket from Open Bionics, a UK-founded tech firm that has the distinction of producing the world’s first clinically approved 3D-printed bionic prosthesis.

The arm employs advanced robotics and AI and syncs with one’s muscle signals, allowing users to use multiple grip patterns and perform a variety of everyday tasks.

Like a high-tech Swiss army knife, it can be equipped with activity-specific attachments, too, ranging from gardening tools to a bridge for playing pool, before being swapped back to a bionic hand for regular use.

“It’s pretty easy and intuitive to kind of switch between them,” said Gowtham, who originally hails from Morningside Heights near Columbia University. “But I think the real winner is that it’s super lightweight and breathable — that’s the major one.”

This comes as 3D tech is revolutionizing medicine by offering patients the chance to recreate body parts that are customized to a patient’s anatomy. Recent examples have included an artificial knee implant in the UK that was tailor-made for the patient’s leg and a UK man who became the recipient of the first-ever 3D-printed eyeball in 2021.

For Gowtham, it filled a literal void he’d experienced since infancy.

At 8 days old, Gowtham suffered a birth defect that cut off the blood supply to his right arm; to prevent gangrene from setting in, doctors had to amputate the limb below the elbow.

Growing up one-handed presented both psychological and physical challenges.

“I would be playing basketball or something, and then one of my laces would come undone, and then it was, like, ‘OK, well, what do I do now?’” He said. “Then I’d have to ask a friend to tie my shoes in the middle of a game, and everyone’s looking.”

Pursuing a career in experimental physics was especially difficult given that it was such a “tactile” vocation, requiring him to perform precise tasks like soldering components of circuit boards measuring under a millimeter in length.

“I helped to design and build or repair some of this ultra-high vacuum [chamber] equipment, and that kind of stuff requires both dexterity but also strength,” he said.

Over the years, he learned to improvise — but, still, he wished better prosthetic options had existed earlier in his life.

“There was a point early on where I didn’t have a prosthetic at all, and it would’ve been really nice to have a good one,” he lamented.

Gowtham’s frustration came from experience.

“I had had some experience with very sophisticated prosthetics that were highly non-breathable and extremely heavy,” he said. “It had too much functionality to actually be useful, if that makes any sense.”

He added that the “old hook that I had in first grade was better.” 

Over time, Gowtham followed light-speed advances in prosthetic tech and eventually reached out to Open Bionics during a time when they were still developing an above-elbow iteration of their prosthetic limbs.

After waiting a year, he was finally outfitted with the life-changing synthetic, which fit like a glove. 

The researcher said it responded seamlessly to his muscle movements while the fingers boasted a degree of articulation he had not encountered before.

That’s because each “Hero FLEX socket is 3D scanned and printed to fit your exact anatomy,” according to the manufacturer’s site, with MyoPods (wireless sensors) “placed where your muscle signals are strongest, giving you intuitive, responsive control from the moment it is fitted.”

The sensors, which require no surgery, detect how Praveen moves his muscles tied to pressure, tension and speed of joint flex, then translate them into bionic finger motions via a Bluetooth connection with the hand.

As a result, there’s barely any delay between the muscle twitch and the corresponding finger movement.

In addition, at just two pounds, it was significantly lighter compared to nine pounds for a prior model.

And while the scientist ironically uses the FLEX more for coding than handling laboratory hardware, it has helped him excel at home tasks from soldering to lifting boxes and even cutting things in the kitchen without slicing “my stump off.”

Plus, there’s noticeably less of a stigma, perhaps a credit to our increasingly tech-saturated society, where advancements like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, myriad helper bots and AI are accompanying people at every turn.

Open Bionics even makes “Star Wars” and superhero-themed arm covers to help wearers blend in if need be. 

Gowtham said that society hasn’t evolved to the point where artificial limbs will offer Iron Man-level improvements rather than simpler aids — but he can imagine that future.

“I think it’s still before the era where I would say it’s functionally something where you would be, like, ‘Oh, maybe I should upgrade to my cyborg hand,'” he said. “But are the attitudes kind of shifting towards that idea? Yeah.”