Massachusetts man uses 3-D printer to make prosthetic hand for his son | Hacker News Reader

Massachusetts man uses 3-D printer to make prosthetic hand for his son

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165 pointscityzen47 comments

This is great, even with all the caveats around it.

Some people can't currently afford real prosthetics, and they're stuck with things like "Soda Bottle Prosthetics" which is a neat hack, but decidedly suboptimal.

http://blog.makezine.com/2009/02/05/plastic-soda-bottle-pros...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvev6shNvSg

Compare that to the teen who asked a Formula One team to help with a false arm (they didn't provide any money, but they helped with fundraising and engineering and now he has an amazing arm) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvev6shNvSg

Medical use of 3d printing is exciting. Even if it's a bit odd. Here's an advert which shows researchers looking at 3d printed proteins to understand protein folding better. The proteins look cute. They could probably sell a version of these as Mr Potato head style toys.

http://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/nation...

That same company do a bunch of medical 3d printers (http://www.3dsystems.com/3d-printers/professional/overview#h...) and they have an entry on Transmaterial about their printer than can use powders as fine as 3 microns. It can build layers of 10 microns. (http://transmaterial.net/phenix-px/)

The 'formula one team' link leads to the same video as the one under the 'soda bottle hack'. Is it this kid? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/motorsport/formulaone/87006...

Whoops yes, sorry!

Almost makes me want to cry to see the impact this can have on someones life. And at such an absurdly low cost. It allows an agile development process for advanced prosthetic limbs.

Of course, the inventors who came up with the design deserve a huge amount of the credit for WHY this is possible. Bravo everyone, what a great story.

Since the article doesn't include the relevant link - http://www.thingiverse.com/robohand/designs

I've been following this Robohand project for quite some time now. They are based in South Africa, with a clinic there, and are trying to expand to the US (Atlanta) and Australia.

It started with a successful crowdsourcing campaign, but they've fallen short of their targets for two other campaigns to keep things growing. http://www.indiegogo.com/individuals/2984667/campaigns

Right now we're building software that would allow them to crank out parts faster. I hope that it can help them out.

DIY prosthetics. This is awesome and cheaper. It's strange that some home made products are cheaper than their industrialized counterparts.

I'm guessing dad didn't pass this by the FDA and he's not protecting himself from his son suing him if everything related to the device doesn't turn out near perfect.

Well, that's a major win, then.

Yeah, I am always happy to pay for defense against myself.

Not strange at all. Industrially made counterparts will have layer upon layer of strength, safety, and reliability requirements set down by law and the maker's liability insurer.

While for this sort of prosthetic is non-invasive so the human trial requirements will be a lot more slack than those that are, I also expect that a commercial of academic researcher will have more hassle arranging an ideal guinea pig or few (and testing requirements will include not just using a single subject).

To mass produce this, or even just to design it with mass production for general use in mind, there are many reasons why this would be much more expensive commercially. For small runs it wouldn't be commercially viable at all.

In this case I'm not surprised that an intelligent and committed amateur with a vested interest (his son) managed to produce something impressive for very little $ cost, where a non-DIY approach would be massively more expensive. Now he needs to make sure his design and process are properly registered so if someone makes millions from it he can have a cut (I'm sure he wouldn't mind individuals making them not-for-$, but a commercial entity making money after having him short-cut their design process would owe him a something).

Yes I know all this regulations, testing, security measure etc, etc..

I'm a bit wondering, in this kinds of regulated and dangerous (at least to the producer via lawsuits), how much quantity of production and consuming would start to beat DIY efficient pricing?

"es I know all this regulations, testing, security measure etc, etc.." - then why did you think it strange that a DIY project would be cheaper?

quantity assumes mass production and I doubt that would apply to something as specialized as human prosthetics.

http://openprosthetics.org/ (Since 2006).

i am curious if 3d printing is up to the task of creating legs? There is a lot more stress on the leg replacements than a hand.

One area of price difference is, you don't have to go through safety checks or other regulations. Top that off by not having the built in costs against lawsuits.

Coworkers husband needs a new leg every very years because even the best ones don't last and the mounting area/pads have to occasionally be changed as he changes

Well, the truth of it is this hand did not cost $1,000 or $2,000. In other words, if you started from not having an initial design and iterated through the many designs leading up to the latest the picture is quite different. Add-up engineering costs at a reasonable rate and the total cost of executing a design --even for a diy case-- is significantly higher.

Once you get to a commercial enterprise things are quite different. Even a small-is company is likely to have 5 to 20 employees, rent, equipment, computers, software and other variable and fixed costs. In addition to that they need to provide sales and post-sales support and stand behind their product for many years. Prototyping and testing alone could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per iteration.

Product Design and Development [0] is a fantastic book that provides insight into the development process for a wide range of products. I have a 1995 edition. It goes from a screwdriver through to engine parts and the mechanical trackball on Apple's old laptops. If you've never been exposed to professional product development and are interested in learning more I'd recommend picking up an older version of this book ($200 for the latest version).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Product-Design-Development-Karl-Ulrich...

Thanks to liability laws and approval processes, many industrial products suffer from the "perfect or nothing" fallacy. The product either has to be perfect or its just better not to produce it at all(1).

Being able to do things for themselves allows people to get around this barrier. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

(1)Government in general often suffers mightily from this: A homeless shelter in my parents home town had to close because they couldn't afford the elevator and ramps to become handicap accessible to maintain their occupancy permits. Now the people just sleep on the street outside.

Your footnote misses the point. This sort of thing does happen, but not because people would want "perfect or nothing." It happens because people want to close down the homeless shelter.

> people want to close down the homeless shelter.

You need to study some Kafka "The Trial" to understand how extreme bureaucracy functions. There's no subversive logic to the irrationality of most of these institutions. It's mostly just apathetic failure.

You need to study some real life, and not fiction, to understand that for the irrationality of any bureaucracy is only set into motion by players in the real world, with motives of some fashion, good, bad or indifferent.

Bureaucracy and its many, many processes are the symptom, not the disease.

You don't need to read books to get the gist of local politics. Peoples' motivations are simple and plain on the surface. Nobody is sitting around going "my god, we have no choice but to close this homeless shelter. Cursed ADA regulations!"

In this case, there was no movement or campaign against it, it was pure apathy. A vote to grant them a variance has been on the agenda for nearly 3 years now waiting for them to get around to it. Most people agree that this should happen as soon as they find the time ("staff", ie the council's lawyer needs to study the insurance implications etc). Meanwhile another winter is coming. They'll open it back up as soon as they're sure they can do it "right".

So the council basically killed it by negligence. Perfect move by ideological politicians - no way they can be blamed, they have to do nothing.

Meanwhile people suffer while profits soar.

This is great, and in the same ballpark as a project friend is doing: he had a disabled son who needed prosthetics to help maintain his posture, but the things were expensive and took months to get sorted out. Enter 3D scanning and printing to accelerate that. (Full background: http://projectandiamo.com/background/)

Naveed's only just getting started out right now, but I bet he won't mind me saying that if you like what he's trying to do, and want to help, please do drop him a line.

The first 3D printer I saw in person was a couple of years ago in Vienna and they were printing a new battery cover for an old gaming device. I was seriously impressed with the technology then, but this really reveals the potential. While obviously it's not on a level with specialized technologies, at least just now, I think the cost factors will drive some interesting applications. You can imagine what a few expensive high quality, but low running cost, printers in a handful of core Indian and Chinese hospitals might be able to do in medical areas where price is a large factor.

I would guess the 3-D printed version is a lot less durable. Also a lot of the cost of prosthetics is the customisation to the individual, which I'm not sure the printer software could handle.

Why not - plenty of people could learn an open source tool like blender and produce another model can't they? As far as durability, I think that's fine for everyday tasks and might even make it a positive, easy to replace, customize for usage type etc.

Oh I agree! I was just thinking about the barrier to entry modifying CAD files. One thing I didn't immediately think of is if you screw up a dimension, you can just print out another to try again...I guess you could argue with the ability to keep improving it over time, the 3D version could have a better fit.

Durability isn't so much of a problem.

At $10 each for materials, I can buy a new one for every single day for the next 5 years and it will still only cost about a quarter of what the fancy prosthetic costs.

Depends. The price of laser sintering CNC machines is coming down quickly, as they're just CO2 lasers (depending on the metal you're fusing together). I can create objects from titanium powder, which as you can imagine is pretty durable.

EDIT: Open source laser sintering [http://makezine.com/2012/02/01/an-open-source-laser-sinterin...]

It's interesting when you consider extending this trend further into medical device creation. Would you print an artificial bone? Artificial body parts?

At what point does the law have to step in and make it illegal to create things that are not protected by the layers of research, testing, and regulation.

> Would you print an artificial bone? Artificial body parts?

This is more an anecdote, than an answer, but when I worked at the Rapid Prototyping Center [0] we built 3D prototypes for Johnson & Johnson including a slightly bowed rod with several holes drilled at various angles. After my roommate had an unfortunate skiing accident over winter break, we learned that the production part was milled/cast from titanium and used to repair fractured bones - as visible in his x-ray. The angled holes were used for the screws to mount the rod to the bone [1].

The parts we produced weren't used directly in bodies, but to aid the design and manufacture of parts that were.

[0] - http://rpc.msoe.edu

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intramedullary_rod

Yes.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/08/75-percent-of-skull-repla...

It's been done. A replacement trachea was grown from scratch in a bio reactor by bathing a man made structure in stem cells. Then transplanting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-qRRZfz4cM

"color" 3D printing, i.e. using different kind of cells that make up real liver

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/24/3d-printed-li...

Making advanced prosthetic hands for under $1000 using 3D printing:

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130905-making-advanced-prost...

The video mentioned in the article:

http://hackaday.com/2013/02/08/3d-printed-prosthetic-hand-he...

I'm personally keeping an eye on this space, partly because robot hands are cool and partly because they're a huge help to what has historically been almost untreatable. (In the sense that treatment would never restore anything approaching prior functionality.)

This is as cool or cooler as the tablet apps that replace thousand-dollar devices and allow even poor and uninsured autistic children to communicate. Congrats to the dad for being awesome.

The world could be changing after all, I applaud the initiative. All positive. Thanks for sharing.

I saw my first 3D printer this weekend in the MSoft store. Thought it was really cool and was going for a cool $2100.00.

this is awesome

I wonder how 3d printing could help in the 3rd world.

I got 2 friends that just started a design studio and they are creating beautiful and affordable prosthetic legs http://www.alleles.ca/

They aren't making prosthetic legs. They're making cosmetic covers for prosthetic legs. There's a big difference there, in terms of durability of materials and engineering behind the design.

Yes, you are right but I think the idea is awesome!

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