MakerBot Industries

Kevin Connolly writes about Open Prosthetics over on Boingboing. He points the way to the Open Prosthetics Project. This is a really cool project that is asking for help to improve and innovate prosthetics!

The most MakerBottable prosthetic appears to be the Trautman Hook and the project has already created files using Alibre and made them available for download. Getting them made in metal would cost between $435 and $7213 depending on the process you use to get them made out of metal, but the cost will be less than a dollar in plastic for anyone who makes them on a MakerBot. Is plastic a viable option? Can MakerBotted plastic be cast in metal? These are frontiers waiting for MakerBot Operators to explore and share back to the prosthetics ning community that the open prosthetics project has set up. They’ve also set up a wiki for documentation of the Trautman Hook.

The designs on the site are released into the public domain which is very cool. The project organizers encourage any derivative works. MakerBot Operators are fearless digital designers that are not afraid to try things out and iterate a design and it seems like this may be a great place for operators to print things and support innovation in the prosthetics space.

I’ve downloaded their public domain Trautman Hook files and uploaded them to Thingiverse to make it easy for folks to share their copies and derivatives. I take no ownership of the files but I am publishing them on Thingiverse to make it easier for folks to make derivatives and track those derivatives. The public domain license is there and so you can go downoad them, check them out and modify them to be easily MakerBottable. Share pictures of your copies and upload your derivative files if you make them!

What will be the challenges to printing prosthetics? What is the best way to work together to support open prosthetic development? We can only find out if we try!

Download, Print, Assemble, Innovate and Share!