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Force-Testing Device for Makers of Children's 3D-Printed Prosthetics

Makers of 3D-printed prosthetic hands may come to rely on a printed palm Rice University students developed to help ensure that children get the most out of the devices. The Rice team calling itself Carpal Diem has developed a testing suite to validate how well 3D-printed hands transfer force from the wearer - typically a child born without a fully formed hand - to the prosthetic intended to help pick up and manipulate small objects. The team's suite consists of a motorized wrist-and-palm assembly that can move up to 60 degrees in either direction, a set of objects (a cylinder, a sphere, and a rectangular prism) with embedded force sensors, and a control program with a graphic user interface. An operator uses the program to bend the wrist and close the printed hand's fingers and thumb around an object. Sensors in the object send feedback on force strength and distribution to the computer.

Topics:
Automation Electronics & Computers Implants & Prosthetics Manufacturing & Prototyping Medical Motion Control Rapid Prototyping & Tooling Robotics Sensors Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 so we're carpel damn we are a team of two Mechanical Engineers two bioengineers and an electrical engineer and what we're working with is we are creating a forced testing device or suite of different devices in order to test 3d printed prosthetic hands so there's a demographic of kids with congenital partial hands and this means that they are born without fully formed

    00:00:25 hands there's a group that's come about in the last few years called a navel it's an online based group of volunteer 3d printers but the issue with these hands is that the prosthetic hand is not absolutely perfect in its function as a normal hand the kid will probably discarded the toilet that's all probably discard it and just go back to its own adapted his or her own adapted ways of

    00:00:49 using it his or her palms before what we have here is basically a testing system to help determine are these hands four sufficient can they do a true cylindrical or spherical grip and how we do that is first we place the hand on our mechanical arm and so basically this is running a motor so that you can see can the hand be gripped at 30 degrees 40 degrees whatever so what you would do is

    00:01:14 you type into our GUI first what direction you want by just switching the toggle button and then how many degrees do you want to go so let's say 30 degrees and you run the program and so with that it's running the motor so that you can see the hand is closing around and you would have some sort of object such as the cylindrical censored object and so with that you can see when you're

    00:01:37 pressing on the different sensors which the hand would be doing you can see the different pressure distribution it also is going to have a force input which is how much pressure you have to put into the hand and also force output so how strong is it gripping these objects the goal of this project is to just give more information to the prosthetics community in general this project is so

    00:02:01 great because it's it's working with people that are just in it for the love of helping and in it for the love of new technologies and what's new and exciting and how can we just understand more about the ways that we can be fabricating settings