3D Printing Breakthrough Could Enable Personalized Prosthetic Devices

A team of researchers at Loughborough University has pioneered a fully digital design-to-manufacturing process that has the potential to revolutionize lower limb socket production. The creation of a lower limb socket has traditionally taken around three-to-six weeks. Watch this video to see how it’s accomplished faster.

Transcript

00:00:08 so first of all we starting our design by having a 3D scanned link profile from the user and then we import that link profile into a cat softwares to generate the prosthetic socket profiles and then based on these design profiles we import that into the 3D printer uh to manufacture using uh the 3D printing techniques the current prothetic sockets are

00:00:34 typically handcrafted by a traditional casting and molding process and the manufacturing still relies on uh labor intensive skills expertise and uh try and error approach making the finished product closer to a work of art than a medical device when I've done uh cast before at hospitals it's purely just sort of like a bandage uh around the leg and they'll wrap it around lots of times

00:01:00 and then it's not it's usually about maybe a month or so until we'll call back in for a fitting but then that takes time for make sure the heights all correctly uh sorted and stuff like that was interesting to hear that this could be done in a lot quicker fashion we have developed inhouse custom printing process using the inhouse printing codes so that we can achieve optimized load

00:01:22 bearing capacities con compared to the conventional printing process we can reduce the printing time significantly from around 40 to 50 hours to up to 8 hours of printing time and finally we can increase our design freedoms by having a spatial varing and properties of the prect socket so that we can have both harder and softer regions within the proect socket to comate more

00:01:48 customizable uh comfort for the user yeah I think this has a lot of potential for different so kids growing up because I know changing I had to change Prosthetics relatively quickly um due to growing so having this being able to be more readily available will help them growing up and also I think across Sports if you want to try out different sport being able to have one being able

00:02:11 to quickly access one will definitely help our ultimate goals for this product is that we want to bring the design and Manufacturing process more easy and accessible for both the healthcare professions and as well as the users uh so that in one day maybe that the prosthetic stocket can be manufactured in local community areas hospitals or even in users home on

00:02:45 demand