Kansas Teenager Uses 3D Printer to Create Prosthetic Hand for Boy

Seventeen-year-old Mason Wilde of Kansas used the 3D printer in the Johnson County Library to create a prosthetic hand for nine-year old Matthew, who was born with only a thumb on his right hand. Matthew's condition - referred to as a limb difference - occurs for unknown reasons in about 5 out of every 10,000 births, and affects hands, arms, legs, and toes. Wilde modified Robohand plans available online to make a device that would fit the boy's small hand. The library keeps its 3D printer in an area called the Makerspace that recently opened. (Video by John Sleezer, The Kansas City Star)

Transcript

00:00:01 awesome make sure you put an exclamation please there was I believe an Australian man who had an um an injury that kind of took away some of his abil mobility of his hands I think he lost a few fingers mhm and after looking for Prosthetics he realized they were too expensive so he developed a variation of this and then this and put the blueprints out for the public to use I had looked into 3D

00:00:27 printers before this came up so I kind of knew the B basic gist of how it all worked so when I realized that the file was just something I needed to plug into a 3D printer and print out with a few modifications it was just kind of cut and dry at that point I move my list right here like this up and down up and down it changes the questions from what happened to your hand to wow that's a

00:00:52 cool hand exactly and there's a different attitude when that's the when that's the question you basically just you can download a file from their website uh thing averse and essentially just print out anything people have molded in a program and then given the file out so this was just a file with numbers you could print out dice you could print out little video game

00:01:12 character figurines we used the um Johnson County resource library but it was free to use so we just brought them the file said hey can we print this out they said sure they printed it out for us and then we took it home and assembled it um MakerBot has a program called makerware which you can open and somewhat edit the file so I took the original file um imported

00:01:33 into that program looked at it realized that it had I think a four or 5 in gap in between this area and his hand was only three so I downscaled it made sure all the fingers were still a good length um and that was a little bit of not necessarily coating but maneuvering around the program to make it fit his hand specifically and the nice thing about that is if he outgrows this one we

00:01:56 can just print out a bigger one yeah so so how about we call this the handex to he's always been self-confident but it's made him um more at ease with it with it I think so it's been a blessing mhm like this know I