Man prefers $50 3-D printed prosethetic hand prefered over his previous $42,000 prosthetic

[thewayne]

The man was born without a left hand and had a prosthetic that sensed muscle movements in his forearm stump and moved fingers accordingly. He's been using one made by a 3-D printer that cost $50 to make, and after a year, prefers it over the one that was over 800 times more expensive.

This could be a real boon to orgs like Doctors Without Borders in places like Sudan.

http://3dprint.com/2438/50-prosthetic-3d-printed-hand/

Comments

[silveradept]

Open source printed prosthetic. Now, if we could make the priners small and easily transportable, there's a lot that could be done in the world.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

They now have 3-D printers that can be made by 3-D printers, so as long as enough computers are available to control them, you're good. I suppose you'd need to supply the controllers and motors, but at least you could make the structure.

I wonder if you could control a 3-D printer with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi? That would certainly cut the cost of a print station.

[silveradept]

Arduino would be better for mass manufacture, as it is designed to loop through its programming infinitely. A Pi, on the other hand, should be abke to do it, assuming someone can compile a CAD program for a not-all-that-much-horses ARM chipset with an older instruction set and a swanky video chip - perhaps by offloading as much of the model computation and the like to the video core?