3D-printed exoskeleton helps young girl use her arms | Hacker News Reader

3D-printed exoskeleton helps young girl use her arms

futuretimeline.net

82 pointsDinoguy100017 comments

This is totally why I get up every morning. We are working on Tinkercad which is a super easy to use CAD tool so that more people can design things for these 3D printing devices. There is a ton of people out there, from small children to research scientists who have ideas that can make the world better and just need a way to express them. Super stuff, thank you for sharing! :-)

This technology can not progress fast enough. Not even an exponential curve is fast enough for this.

If you work on this technology the world should cancel all your leave until 2025.

Umm what?

There are people who suffer because this technology either doesn't exist yet or is unavailable in their area...therefore the progress of this technology needs to sped up. As a joke I'm saying that all the leave should be cancelled for these engineers until the technology is available to the people who need it.

Ahh, got it.

There are 7 billion people on the planet. Most don't go to college. Heck, even of those who do, most don't work on anything interesting. The real trick is to get a lot more people working on problems that matter.

Therefore all leave should be cancelled for people who aren't currently working on this technology?

"The real trick is to get a lot more people working on problems that matter." In other words, we can rely on a few people doing important work or we could get more people in the "game." There will be plenty of time off for everyone

A few years later, you will have a totally burned team, half of them in the middle of a divorce because the family had no vacations for years.

A better idea is to give them double leave time, so you can get more and smarter people working in the project. The same people can choose between this project and working in a 4-day-work-week company, for more money.

But actually, a more efferent use of the resources would give the team a lot of auxiliary support, so they don't have to deal with the invoice system of the university and the providers, they don't have to care about how to install the heating/air conditioning, they have some money to hire a mechanical technician to help with the design of the system, and a lot of small things that waste a lot of time. (I work in a University and sometime I weep when I read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html or http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio... .)

What does it do? Do the springs countweight her arms to give them neutral weight?

I think that's the case. Early in the video, she was saying that she couldn't lift her arms anymore. It's like wearing exo-armor all the time for super strength.

I hope it will act as a gateway/threshold, now she can use her arms it might activate changes/growth in her upper body.

You've got it right. At the bottom of the project's website[1] is a list of publications of which two explain it well - and they're available as free .pdf's:

1. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%E2%80%9CPassive+exoskel...

2. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=A+Simple+Technique+to+Pa...

[1]: http://www.nemours.org/research/labcenter/orthopedics/perl/w...

Do you know what disease causes that sort of problem?

The video description on YouTube says it's arthrogryposis.

That was very cool. And yes, definitely reminded me of Aliens.

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