e-NABLE has made headlines for its efforts in providing custom, low-cost prosthetics to people in need, particularly children born with hand deformities caused by amniotic band syndrome. Most recently, the nonprofit made a big splash at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where they hosted the Prosthetists meet 3D Printers conference, joining together everyone from children and parents to doctors and 3D modelers to mingle and share knowledge about prosthetics and 3D printing. Up until now, creating prosthetics for each individual member of the e-NABLE community has required uniquely designing every one. Thanks to the company’s latest initiative, however, enabling those in need of affordable prostheses has never been easier.
After donating $10,000 worth of 3D printers to the nonprofit, Ultimaker has gone a step further to help e-NABLE, and other prosthetic printing groups, produce personally-tailored hands. And, the printer manufacturer’s 3D printables site, YouMagine, has now launched and is hosting a new online customization tool called the Hand-O-Matic, which generates a 3D printable hand based on the measurements of a given individual. The Hand-O-Matic tool was conceived, built and tested by the dedicated and talented team from the e-NABLE R&D division over many months.
Though the e-NABLE community has come up with a pretty wide variety of prosthetic models, the Hand-O-Matic is currently designed to customize their most recent model, the Raptor Hand, released just before the Baltimore conference. After entering your measurements into the online tool – the width across your knuckles and the length of your palm – you’re presented with a Raptor Hand crafted just for you. You can select a few different options, whether or not you need a prosthetic thumb or a flared gauntlet or if you want to print it with support structures. And, once you’ve completed altering the model, the site will e-mail the .stl to you for 3D printing at home, at a neighbors, or through an online service/community.
By creating this tool and hosting it on YouMagine, e-NABLE has taken a lot of the design work out of customising its existing library of hand models to the specific individual. As a result, the practice of 3D printing low-cost prosthetics, a trend that is already spreading like wildfire, will proliferate with greater fervor. And all of it was made possible with this distributed manufacturing technology and the sharing of information facilitated by the internet. As the two feed off of each other more and more, what may be possible at this time next year may be even harder to imagine.
This sort of ease-to-create is the future of consumer 3D printing.