When Natasha Hope-Simpson lost her leg, her life came to a stop. But she built new momentum through design, as she created a beautiful, custom 3D-printable prosthetic leg that reflected her character in ways that a stock prosthetic never could. See how she and a team of 3D experts went from design to prototype in only two weeks.
In the research that Robohand has conducted with patients who have prosthetic legs, the two main issues facing them are; 1. They are not comfortable, creating pressure sores on the bits they have left and 2. The functionality is limited in that the ankle does not respond, or they need to “kick out” the leg when they step which is completely unnatural. This in turn is causing secondary pain in the form of hip displacement and limping.
Richard van As has taken his idea of a simple, functional, low cost prosthetic leg, and with the help of several great minds, brought his concept to fruition. Robohand are lucky to have two Interns from the University of Pennsylvania, Pele Collins studying Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Steven Rybicki studying a BSE in Bioengineering, who both applied and received a grant from the University to fund their Internship. Our colleague from Robohand Australia, Grae Scheuber who besides having a BSc (Hons) is a scripting genius, Ian Pells Robohand Cape Town with a Bachelor of Arts Fine Art, Higher Diploma in Education and Master of Arts in Fine Art, Leonard Nel VP Information Technology for ShadowMatch with a BSc in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, held a makers weekend from 16-19 May where the designs for RoboLeg were refined, scripted, printed and assembled.
I recently had the opportunity to work with a great guy named Jose Delgado, Jr., a 53-year old who was born without most of his left hand. I made a 3D printed prosthetic hand for Jose and, after using it for a while, I asked him to give me some honest feedback about how it compares to his more expensive myoelectric prosthesis. This is obviously not an "apples to apples" comparison in terms of the devices, but the real value of a prosthesis comes from how useful it is on a day-to-day basis, and that is the focus of the comparison here.
This 3D printed prosthesis is a completely mechanical design. There are a series of non-flexible cords running along the underside of each finger, connecting to a "tensioning block" on the top rear of the device (the "gauntlet"). The tension is caused by bending the wrist downward. With the wrist in its natural resting position, the fingers are extended, with a natural inward curve. When the wrist is bent 20-30 degrees downward, the non-flexible cords are pulled, causing the fingers and thumb to bend inwards. A second series of flexible cords run along the tops of the fingers, causing the fingers to return automatically when tension is released.
3D printers are coming down in price rapidly. As of today, you can get a self-assembly kit starting at around a few hundred dollars, and a fully assembled "prosumer" level printer is going for around $1000-$2000. In other words, this kind of technology is becoming very accessible, and it's opening up some very exciting possibilities!
Watch Amanda Boxtel walk again after years in a wheelchair using the 3D printed bionic exoskeleton by Ekso Bionics and 3D Systems.
RoboBeast is designed to be ‘bulletproof’. It requires no set-up software tweaks, or mechanical adjustment of the frame before you print. It’s designed to be thrown in the back of a Land Rover, carted off into the bush, and to start working as soon as the power is on. You can move it during operation and the print head stays steady: it can even print if flipped upside down.
Using software tweaks inherited from Quentin Harley’s RepRap Morgan, RoboBeast’s extruder head will also be able able to calibrate itself to compensate for any movement in the print bed, ensuring evenly layered prints regardless of whether or not the machine is level.To make it easy to operate, RoboBeast’s SD card is loaded with preconfigured RoboHand models in a variety of sizes. Recipients just need to tap the correct size on the touchscreen and wait
Developed by Dr. Kee Moon and Jeremiah Cox, the device seeks to better conform to the way the body moved before an accident or injury occurred. Rather than rigidly control the movements of the leg, their device nudges - or kicks - the leg to begin natural physical motion. In the future, the bionic leg will further tie in with the brain to better adapt to former muscle memory, allowing the patient to better achieve their previous and unique way of walking or moving.
Just before Thanksgiving 2013, Not Impossible's Mick Ebeling returned home from Sudan's Nuba Mountains where he set up what is probably the world's first 3D-printing prosthetic lab and training facility. More to the point of the journey is that Mick managed to give hope and independence back to a kid who, at age 14, had both his arms blown off and considered his life not worth living.Low cost easy to deploy technology that empowers and helps people directly. Strong STRONG example of impact of DIY 3d printing.
Description
Function
''Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand'' is an artificial hand that recovers lost functions of amputees. It utilizes electrical signal measured on skin surface of their remaining muscles. A variety of myoelectric prosthetic hands has been developed around the world, however, none of them are offered at an affordable price costing more than $400. We solve this problem in following ways: 1. Using smartphone. Conventional hands required an exclusive device for computation. We replace this with a smartphone which users have. 2. Using 3D printer. One of the main reason that makes components expensive is strict requirement on robustness. In sacrifice of robustness, we offer repairable hand. All components are printable by a 3D printer, enabling users to modify and reproduce them easily. 3. Under-actuated mechanism for finger flexion. To reduce the number of motors, we developed a three-joints finger actuated by one motor that passively changes its trajectory depending on the shape of an object.
Inspiration
Our team has been working on myoelectric prosthetic hand since college days. We were pursuing highly functional hand that can perform strong, precise and diverse motions. Talking with amputees, however, we realized that high functionality is not necessarily the first priority to reduce their daily challenges. ''My only hand is useless because of an umbrella in a rainy day. I cannot eat steak by myself since knife and fork requires two hands.'' said my amputee friend. These tasks don’t require dexterous motions. It is rather the ''price'' of prosthetic hand that restricts amputees from using myoelectric prosthetic hand. Therefore, ''Handie'' is designed to provide amputees with sufficient functions at an affordable price.
Development
We defined Handie's essential function as ''to support the dominant hand''. To realize this, we set minimum number of motors as six: ''thumb rotation'' and flexion of each finger. Thumb rotation is necessary because thumb is facing other fingers when grabbing an object, while it is parallel to other fingers when holding down an object on a table. Secondly, to reduce the cost, we utilized 3D printer. Besides skeleton, we made ringshaped elastic elements placed at finger joints also by 3D printer. Through iteration of prototype, the shape of the element was optimized to have required strength and other properties. Finally, to make the hand easy to repair and reassemble, we separated the skeleton of each finger into units
How is 3D printing changing the future of prosthetic and animatronic limbs? Tinkering with this new technology 17-year old inventor Easton LaChappelle is creating robotic limbs with strength and dexterity beyond human, and will create new models for custom prosthetics in the not-so-distant future.
This project was my take on a DIY visual impairment aid that uses haptic and sound feedback. Basically it uses a distance sensor to measure how far objects are from it and then it beeps/vibrates accordingly (far away is slow vibrate/long beep delay and close up is fast vibrate/quick beeps). The difference between this project and others is this project uses one distance sensor (as opposed to many) to make feedback more specific and simpler to interpret, use of both haptic and sound feedback, the mounting of the device under the arm and not attached to the hand (keeps it free to feel where you're going and use for daily tasks), and a few simple control buttons on the case (I also put the word for each button in braille next to them). What I really like about the design is how compact and sturdy it is. I wore it around for a few hours to get used to it and found it didn't hinder too many of my daily activities (I found it fit in sleeves too!).
