DIY prosthetics. This is awesome and cheaper. It's strange that some home made products are cheaper than their industrialized counterparts.
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...
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.
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.
Bureaucracy and its many, many processes are the symptom, not the disease.
Meanwhile people suffer while profits soar.
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).
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?
quantity assumes mass production and I doubt that would apply to something as specialized as human prosthetics.
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