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Beyond ADLs: Instrumental Activities of Daily Living with an Upper Limb Prosthesis

Amber Henson
by Amber Henson
Oct 20, 2026

Basic Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are bathroom tasks (showering, toileting, personal hygiene), dressing, eating and getting around (mobility). Those are all tasks that an upper limb prosthesis can help with – which we wrote about in our article Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) for People with an Upper Limb Difference. While all of those tasks go a long way toward making someone independent, they don’t mean that someone is fully independent. To get closer to that, someone needs to be able to perform the tasks listed under Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs). In this article, we’ll go through them and discuss and show how a prosthesis, or prostheses, can help individuals accomplish those tasks.

According to the National Institutes of Health, the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living require more complex thinking skills, including organizational skills. The skills are managing finances, transportation, shopping, meal preparation, house cleaning and home maintenance, managing communication and managing medications. We speak with our patients about what their goals are and help them improve on their ADL and IADL skills. When our patients come in, we work with them on skills they need for their life, which is part of what makes our Arm Dynamics care model different from other prosthetic care centers.

Managing finances:
We’ll look at this from two different perspectives. One is that an individual needs to be able to use their phone or a computer to pay bills, do their banking and more. Our article Typing and Texting with an Upper Limb Prosthesis contains a lot of information about different types of prostheses and how people use them with their phones and computers. We can tell you that many prostheses are made with touch screens in mind and have the technology to interact with them.

For the other perspective of buying things while out and about, a person has to be able to take out their wallet and get cards and money out of it, and they may also have to pick up coins. You can watch Junior take stuff out of his wallet using his passive-positional prosthesis in his patient progress video:

In Som’s video, you can watch him pick up coins using his passive-positional prosthesis:

Transportation:
While navigating public transportation can be difficult, wearing a prosthesis shouldn’t impact it much (besides the possibility of people staring, which is a whole other subject). Driving, however, can be a learning curve depending on one’s limb difference level. For more information regarding driving with a prosthesis, please see our article Driving with an Upper Limb Difference. We are also able to refer our patients to a Driver Rehabilitation Specialist, a certified professional (who is usually an occupational or physical therapist offering this specific specialty) who assists with driving-related rehabilitation, assessment, vehicle modification, et cetera.

Shopping:
Oftentimes, our clinical therapy specialists will go out with our patients to shop at a nearby store as part of the process of teaching them how to use their device. You can watch our patient Sophie buy food at the grocery store before going back to the center to prepare a full meal using her V2P device:

Preparing meals:
You can watch Sophie’s video above, or you can watch our patient Yanick shop and prepare a meal using his hybrid partial-hand prosthesis in a video featured in his article. We also have several articles about food preparation, cooking, baking and organizing that you can find here.

House cleaning and maintenance:
Our article titled House Cleaning with an Upper Limb Prosthetic Device contains tips from one of our clinical therapy specialists about what to keep in mind while cleaning with a prosthesis. Laundry and folding clothes are topics in our article Fine Motor Skills and Upper Limb Prostheses. As for maintenance, that’s a much broader subject. We have articles regarding gardening and yardwork, and another that focuses on heavy-duty activities.

Managing communication:
As mentioned above, our article Typing and Texting with an Upper Limb Prosthesis should be helpful when it comes to using a computer and/or smartphone while wearing a prosthesis.

Managing medications:
Watch our patient John use his ETD to pick up small pills and place them back into a bottle.

This is a pretty standard outcome measure task that our clinical therapy specialists ask our patients to perform because it helps them figure out how to grip small objects – but it’s also helpful for anyone taking any type of medication or vitamin.

Keep in mind that our clinical therapy specialists will always focus first on the patient becoming independent in their ADLs. It may take longer for people to become independent in IADLs, and some individuals may always need some form of assistance. When we first meet with our patients, we assess how much help they may need with their tasks.

While all of the tasks above are very, very necessary, they are also chores! What if you want to do something a little more fun, like a hobby or a sport or, say, flying a helicopter? Well, we have articles on those, too: Hobbies When You Have a Limb Difference, Exercising When You Have an Upper Limb Difference and The Top 15 Coolest Things Our Patients Have Done AFTER Limb Loss.

Top15-Listing

We want our patients to be able to do all their daily tasks with a prosthesis that fits well, is comfortable and is one that they know how to use. To do this, our prosthetists have to use their years of experience and their listening skills to create what their patients both need and want. Our clinical therapy specialists have to work with their patients to help them learn how to use their devices in a way that is efficient and ergonomic. This kind of patient care is what we excel at, and if you’re interested in seeing what we can do for you, please contact us. You are also welcome to leave a comment below.

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