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A teen who built a prosthetic arm for his dad
- jngreenlee 9y agoPretty awesome. Will the medical industry prevent this from getting on US broadcast TV, as one of the largest sponsors of advertising?
- maxerickson 9y agoNote that the video intro is the ABC national evening news: http://abcnews.go.com/US/teen-builds-baseball-throwing-prosthetic-arm-father-injured/story?id=53683928 http://abcnews.go.com/US/teen-builds-baseball-throwing-prost... The BBC probably did the story after seeing it air on US broadcast tv 2 weeks ago.
- darkerside 9y agoThis is the best version of our future. Young people realizing that technology has reached a point where individuals can create new things, not for a paycheck but because they improve our own and each other's lives. You think Uber disrupted the taxi industry? One kid just disrupted an entire branch of biomedical engineering. Of course, this could easily be followed up by the worst version of our future, where work like this comes to be expected and demanded of our best and brightest with no appreciation for their efforts. Act wisely, humans!
- maxerickson 9y agoI really hope the hand is just an impressive high school project and that the father also has access to a state of the art prosthetic from the VA. He should.
- sramam 9y agowonder which one the Dad would be prouder to wear?!
- vectorEQ 9y agoif it was concerning an actual limb of mine, i'd say utility would go over pride on that one :/ pride has a limited scope tbh. he can be proud of his sons acheivement and not wear it thats totally ok..
- corpMaverick 9y agoI know it is a rhetorical question. But there is a practical answer. The article said that it was designed to play video games. So he would use that one for that purpose and the other one for general use. The gist is that now we are able to design affordable things for specific purposes.
- simonh 9y agoI agree it sounded that way from the way they edited it, but the video game controller adapter made the controller usable with one hand. It was a separate project from the arm, the video shows his father playing a video game with his left hand, while his right arm is visible with no prosthetic on it.
- cicero 9y agoThis story[1] shows the prosthetic that he received at the time of his injury, but it does not have a hand that can grip a baseball. 1: http://abcnews.go.com/US/teen-builds-baseball-throwing-prosthetic-arm-father-injured/story?id=53683928 http://abcnews.go.com/US/teen-builds-baseball-throwing-prost...
- maxerickson 9y agoThere's really no information given about whether he continued to use a hook or whether he is using a more advanced prosthetic. Not being able to throw a baseball could still be a limitation of a more advanced prosthetic.
- cptskippy 9y agoI doubt his father would receive anything approaching state of the art. The VA doesn't hand out Lamborginis they hand out Hondas. 3d Printed prosthetic are nothing new and it doesn't sound like the kid designed his own from scratch prosthetic, he just used an existing model. As you alluded to in your comment, Commercially available prosthetics are superior however 3d printed ones offer several advantages. A 3d printed prosthetic is orders of magnitude less expensive which means an individual can have multiple specifically suited units instead of one or perhaps 2 expensive prosthesis. The Nintendo Switch prosthesis shown in the video is a great example, it's far more functional for playing the Switch than any commercial prosthesis. They're infinitely easily customized which has numerous advantages both in function and in appearance. For a child, a prosthesis can be a source of shame because kids are beyond cruel. A custom 3d printed prosthesis can be the difference between being made fun of and being admired. https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8207133/3d-printed-iron-man-prosthetic-limbitless-solutions https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8207133/3d-printed-iron-m...
- otakucode 9y agoThe shakeup that society will experience from computers and the Internet has not even begun to quake things to their core. The Industrial Revolution invented the idea of the adolescent as a separate class of human. The technological future might very well remove it. While there might arguably be a need for adolescents to be physically strong and capable of physical endurance to work assembly lines and similar.... what teenager couldn't do mental work? They write code on their free time, but can't do it for pay? Unlikely. More likely they will begin illegally working 'under the table' online and eventually be made official, alongside enfranchisement in terms of suffrage and general societal respect. And that's just one little change. The Industrial Revolution also changed how families were structured, how children were parented, how society saw itself, how homes were built, and a multitude of other things. We'll see similar changes... eventually. Maybe. We're a bit more self-aware this time... and there are old cronies with empires on the line larger than wars have been fought over before... so we shall see.
- lettergram 9y agoI've had the privilege of working alongside some other groups making cheaper, better prostetics: http://www.psyonic.co/technology/ http://www.psyonic.co/technology/ It's amazing how much there is to improve, and how small adjustments or really people who care can make a massive difference. It's not supprising at all that this guy's soon built him a better arm than many of the standard stuff out there (which is expensive and breaks).
- weinzierl 9y agoReminds me of the story of Daniel Gurdan[1] who lost two fingers as a child doing chemistry experiments in his parents basement. Being an avid juggler he made himself a juggling glove with servo driven prosthetic fingers [2] and won the first price in the German national science competition (Jugend forscht) in 1999 [3]. He won another price in the same competition in another year for building a UAV which could be flown by moving the hand in a special glove. He co-founded the UAV company Ascending Technologies [4] which was later acquired by Intel[5]. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/person/daniel-gurdan#section-recent-news-and-activity https://www.crunchbase.com/person/daniel-gurdan#section-rece... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/DE19906294A1/3Den https://patents.google.com/patent/DE19906294A1/3Den [3] https://www.jugend-forscht.de/projektdatenbank/jonglierhandschuh-servotechnische-fingerprothese.html https://www.jugend-forscht.de/projektdatenbank/jonglierhands... [4] http://www.asctec.de/en http://www.asctec.de/en [5] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ascending-technologies https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ascending-technologi...
- f0wl 9y agoI took part in the 2017 round of 'Jugend forscht' and actually talked to him for about 10 minutes. One of the judges already told me about AsTech, but I didn't know about his first project. Even though he wasn't really familiar with my topic he immediately recognized a flaw in my work and had a lot of good ideas on hand. His story is really inspiring.
- kmfrk 9y agoHow safe are the materials for 3D printing wrt contact with human skin these days? I recall earlier versions of resin being a bit dodgy back in the day.
- tsmarsh 9y agoYeah, the resins before they’re cured are pretty gnarly. But the filament based plastics are usually fine. There is some questions around melting ABS in a home environment. The volume of gasses released are almost certainly below danger levels, but there are viable and ‘safer’ alternatives in PLA and PETG that are easier to print offering better resolution at the cost of high temperature resistant (PETG is similar to the plastic used in water bottles). Unless you live in a dry, desert climate I’d advise against ABS anyway.
- ben_w 9y agoReally? I thought one advantage of ABS was that it doesn’t dissolve in water, unlike PLA? And that one disadvantage of ABS was being UV sensitive, whereas PLA is relatively resistant?
- mattmillr 9y agoWhen I was using an early Makerbot (wow, seven years ago now) the preferred materials for extruder-based 3D printers were ABS, which toys are made of, and PLA, which is used for food-safe cups and utensils. I'd imagine they're OK.
- sannee 9y agoThe food safety concern about porosity and bacteria growth would probably apply for stuff like this. Should be easy to solve by reprinting the prosthesis every few months or something like that.
- jakeogh 9y agoOr design it to be coated with an appropriate epoxy.
- tsmarsh 9y agoAfter building my own printer from parts and realizing how hard it is to make something that can follow gcode accurately, repeatedly and quickly I’m still left wondering “How good is this hand?” Most of the stuff I’ve printed or built has ended up being “ok”. A lot of that is that I’m not a meatspace engineer, or a pixie engineer, I’m a software engineer. So I’m very much on the learning curve of robotics... but there is a lot to learn. AvE talks a lot about industrial lego, and its true you can just bolt and solder stuff together and get a prototype, or a proof of concept, but getting that to a product is really hard. So when we say that a kid has built an arm for his Dad, is that a cute story or a sign that the bar for this kind of technology has dropped to the point that a high school kid can build a useful product? I suspect in this instance its a cute story. That or I really need to up my game.
- nickparker 9y agoThere's a pretty large community online 3D printing prosthetics, mainly the loosely affiliated community called enabling the future[0] and a nonprofit which sprung from them called Limbforge[1]. The printed prostheses are almost all body powered, which means they use some sort of harness to pull a cable with the closest extant joint on the arm, and those cables close the grip. As body powered prostheses go, they're pretty good nowadays. They're still nowhere near the usefulness of say a BeBionic, but they cost tens of dollars instead of tens of thousands, so it's a reasonable trade-off. Kids are the best use case by far though, because they grow out of their hands every year or two. When you can amortize the cost over years I think the high end devices are a much better choice, but if someone can't afford them or just doesn't want a prosthesis that badly the printed options are still a nice alternative. [0]: http://enablingthefuture.org/ http://enablingthefuture.org/ [1]: https://www.limbforge.org/ https://www.limbforge.org/
- fhood 9y agoI mean, unless you have an incredibly high end printer nobody expects 3d printed parts to come out perfect. As far as I can tell, you pretty much always need to to some hand fitting afterwards. My part time job in highschool involved building robots (as in actually assembling them) for a small company, and as a result I feel comfortable claiming that anyone with access to CAD, and a machine shop can build a workable "robot".
- agumonkey 9y agoI need to do a leg for our neighbor's 3legged cat..
- rocky1138 9y ago> “You design one thing and can email it to someone else… and you’re helping people all over,” Robbie says. “That’s the power of engineering.” Damn. I really wish he would have included the ability for those people to make their own improvements and share them back to make the whole ecosystem better. That's one of the major tenets of free software licenses and this is a perfect opportunity to make sure that right gets included in this mindset. Not to take away from anything else in the piece or his work, but definitely a missed opportunity.
- ryanhuff 9y agoSomebody on a 3d printing forum that I belong to has posted pictures of arm/hand prosthetics that he has printed for kids who didn't have access to more expensive commercially available prosthetics. Its amazing the impact that 3d printing technology and few dollars in filament can have on a person's life.
- blufox 9y agoThis may be the original article http://fox2now.com/2018/02/20/high-school-student-learns-to-use-3-d-printer-to-make-an-arm-for-his-father/ http://fox2now.com/2018/02/20/high-school-student-learns-to-...
- macjohnmcc 9y agoIt is truly amazing what people can do with 3D printers and some ingenuity. Yesterday I designed and printed a part to fix a broken pepper mill so my only contribution to society using 3D printing so far is that I didn't toss an otherwise good item in the trash.
- twothamendment 9y agoI've always thought 3D printers were cool, but never found a reason to want one of my own. You just gave me a reason. A big enough reason? We'll see. I hate throwing out things that are 99% fine, but have one little, broken part you know you can't buy anywhere.
- tdvorak 9y agoWhat about joining a local hackerspace, if that's an option? You can get access to much better machines than you would buy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace
- macjohnmcc 9y agoSo far I fixed that pepper mill. Fixed a broken part of my wife's car that held the controls for her drivers side seat that probably would have cost as much as the printer since it is a Mercedes. I printed a small fold-able stand for my Mac Book Pro that allows me to place a fan behind it and blow air over and under it to keep it cool while closed. My next project is designing and printing a new tone armrest for my old Pioneer turntable.