A teen who built a prosthetic arm for his dad

I took part in the 2017 round of 'Jugend forscht' and actually talked to him for about 10 minutes. One of the judges already told me about AsTech, but I didn't know about his first project. Even though he wasn't really familiar with my topic he immediately recognized a flaw in my work and had a lot of good ideas on hand. His story is really inspiring.

I really hope the hand is just an impressive high school project and that the father also has access to a state of the art prosthetic from the VA. He should.

The shakeup that society will experience from computers and the Internet has not even begun to quake things to their core. The Industrial Revolution invented the idea of the adolescent as a separate class of human. The technological future might very well remove it. While there might arguably be a need for adolescents to be physically strong and capable of physical endurance to work assembly lines and similar.... what teenager couldn't do mental work? They write code on their free time, but can't do it for pay? Unlikely. More likely they will begin illegally working 'under the table' online and eventually be made official, alongside enfranchisement in terms of suffrage and general societal respect.

And that's just one little change. The Industrial Revolution also changed how families were structured, how children were parented, how society saw itself, how homes were built, and a multitude of other things. We'll see similar changes... eventually. Maybe. We're a bit more self-aware this time... and there are old cronies with empires on the line larger than wars have been fought over before... so we shall see.

There's a pretty large community online 3D printing prosthetics, mainly the loosely affiliated community called enabling the future[0] and a nonprofit which sprung from them called Limbforge[1].

The printed prostheses are almost all body powered, which means they use some sort of harness to pull a cable with the closest extant joint on the arm, and those cables close the grip.

As body powered prostheses go, they're pretty good nowadays. They're still nowhere near the usefulness of say a BeBionic, but they cost tens of dollars instead of tens of thousands, so it's a reasonable trade-off.

Kids are the best use case by far though, because they grow out of their hands every year or two. When you can amortize the cost over years I think the high end devices are a much better choice, but if someone can't afford them or just doesn't want a prosthesis that badly the printed options are still a nice alternative.

[0]: http://enablingthefuture.org/ [1]: https://www.limbforge.org/

I mean, unless you have an incredibly high end printer nobody expects 3d printed parts to come out perfect. As far as I can tell, you pretty much always need to to some hand fitting afterwards. My part time job in highschool involved building robots (as in actually assembling them) for a small company, and as a result I feel comfortable claiming that anyone with access to CAD, and a machine shop can build a workable "robot".

The ABC article seems a bit more informative: http://abcnews.go.com/US/teen-builds-baseball-throwing-prost...

This kid designed CAD models and printed two entirely different prosthetic arms: one to use a Switch controller one-handed (with the remaining good arm, obviously) and one for throwing a baseball. They clearly both serve their purpose pretty well. He's enabled at least two use cases that his dad was unable to do with his existing commercial prosthetic arm, so I'd say it's more than a 'cute story'.

Looks like they used an i3 Duplicator Plus which is a $350 machine. I have a near-identical model myself (non-plus version) and the prints are fine, though it can take a lot of fiddling/calibration to get there.

Your instincts are right. Finished goods are the result of skilled work by many, many people.

Yeah, the resins before they’re cured are pretty gnarly.

But the filament based plastics are usually fine. There is some questions around melting ABS in a home environment. The volume of gasses released are almost certainly below danger levels, but there are viable and ‘safer’ alternatives in PLA and PETG that are easier to print offering better resolution at the cost of high temperature resistant (PETG is similar to the plastic used in water bottles).

Unless you live in a dry, desert climate I’d advise against ABS anyway.

When I was using an early Makerbot (wow, seven years ago now) the preferred materials for extruder-based 3D printers were ABS, which toys are made of, and PLA, which is used for food-safe cups and utensils. I'd imagine they're OK.

The food safety concern about porosity and bacteria growth would probably apply for stuff like this.

Should be easy to solve by reprinting the prosthesis every few months or something like that.

I've always thought 3D printers were cool, but never found a reason to want one of my own. You just gave me a reason. A big enough reason? We'll see. I hate throwing out things that are 99% fine, but have one little, broken part you know you can't buy anywhere.

Note that the video intro is the ABC national evening news:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/teen-builds-baseball-throwing-prost...

The BBC probably did the story after seeing it air on US broadcast tv 2 weeks ago.