3-D Printed Prosthetics: This Is How You Get Them to Children

[rdean]

3-D Printed Prosthetics This Is How You Get Them to Children Qmed

The stories continue to mount. One of the latest involves 7-year-old Faith Lennox, who lives outside Los Angeles, and the robotic hand she recently received. Her parents were on a waiting list with E-Nable. But their luck changed when a nearby 3-D printing studio called Build It Workspace was willing to create the hand on its own at a cost of $50 using E-Nable’s designs.

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Printing out prosthetics. Incredible. See what education can do?

 

[waltky]

Hope for people missing an arm...

Man moves prosthetic arm with his mind in proof-of-concept study
Feb. 17, 2016 - After scientists mapped a man's brain, he was able to control fingers attached to the prosthetic just by thinking about moving.

Using his mind, a man moved fingers attached to the hand of a prosthetic arm, which scientists at Johns Hopkins University believe is a first for a person who has not undergone extensive training before doing so. Scientists said it may be years before technology used in the new proof-of-concept study can be widely applied, but precise mapping of the brain has given them a much greater understanding of how people can interact with prosthetic body parts.

The man in the study, who is not missing a limb, was able to move individual fingers to grab things just by thinking about it, as a result of electrodes implanted in his brain. The enhanced information gained from these electrodes, the scientists said, is what they say makes their study so significant. "The electrodes used to measure brain activity in this study gave us better resolution of a large region of cortex than anything we've used before and allowed for more precise spatial mapping in the brain," Guy Hotson, graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, said in a press release. "This precision is what allowed us to separate the control of individual fingers."

Researchers say it will be years before the technology allowing a man to move fingers on a prosthetic arm just by thinking about it can be applied to patients without limbs.​

For the study, which is published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, the scientists recruited a man with epilepsy undergoing brain mapping to identify the origin of his seizures. Scientists in the study took advantage of the fact that a 128-electrode array of sensors placed in the man's brain for his epilepsy treatment could also control a prosthetic limb developed at the university. After mapping which parts of the man's brain were responsible for moving each finger, and programming the prosthesis to respond to signals from that part of the brain, the scientists connected the limb and asked him to "think" about moving each of his fingers individually.

The man's accuracy at moving the prosthetic was around 76 percent, until the ring and little fingers were coupled to move together -- because those parts of the brain overlap and people often move the two digits together -- increasing his accuracy to about 88 percent. Most notable is that the man did not need to be taught to control the system or prosthesis, and the entire experiment took less than two hours, unlike other prosthetics that often take weeks to learn to use and gain accuracy. Further research into prosthetic technology, computer systems, and much more extensive mapping of the brain are needed before the method can be used with people without limbs, but the potential for it to help people is huge, scientists said.

Man moves prosthetic arm with his mind in proof-of-concept study

 

[waltky]

Solar powered skin helps Prosthetic Limbs Get Better Feeling...

Skin Powered by the Sun? Energy-Saving Prosthetic Limbs Get Better Feeling
March
23, 2017 — Amputees with prosthetic limbs may soon have much a better
sense of touch, temperature and texture, thanks to the energy-saving
power of the sun, British researchers said on Thursday.

While
prosthetics are usually fully powered using batteries, a new prototype
from University of Glasgow researchers opens up the possibility for
so-called "solar-powered skin," which would include better sense
capabilities than current technology. "If an entity is going out in a
sunny day, then they won't need any battery" to activate their senses,
said Ravinder Dahiya, a research fellow at the university and a leader
of the study. "They can feel, without worrying about battery." The
technology involves installing a thin layer of pure carbon around a
prosthetic arm, hand or leg. This allows light to pass through it and be
easily used as solar energy, the researchers said in a research paper.

Ravinder Dahiya of the University of Glasgow’s School of Engineering
poses with the prosthetic hand developed by his team at Glasgow
University, Scotland​

The
sun can provide up to 15 times more energy than is usually needed to
power a prosthetic limb, Dahiya said. This extra — and renewable —
energy can be used to power sensors that increase sense and feeling in a
limb, so much so that the prosthetic can feel pressure, temperature and
texture like natural skin, the paper said. "The skin is sensitive to
touch and pressure, so when you touch the skin there you will know what
point you are contacting and how much force you are applying," Dahiya
said, describing the prototype. The scientists are the first to develop
a model for solar-powered prosthetic skin, he told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.

The
technology could also increase the functionality of robots, allowing
them to have a better understanding of what they touch and interact
with, according to Dahiya. If robots had limbs that are sensitive to
touch and pressure they would be less likely to make errors or injure
humans, he said. The researchers hope to further develop the prototype
in the next two years, Dahiya said. Eventually, he hopes to power the
limb's motors with the renewable energy as well - rather than just the
skin. "Because we are saving a lot of energy, our vision is that ... if
we store this energy in some way we will be able to also power the
motors with the energy," he said. "The prosthetic will be fully energy
autonomous."

Skin Powered by the Sun? Energy-Saving Prosthetic Limbs Get Better Feeling

 

[Old Rocks]

Ah yes, now let's cut scientific research funds. I mean according to the 'Conservative' meme all they do is support a bunch of pointy headed liberals living the high life. And they make these statements on a keyboard attached to a computer, and it gets posted, via the internet, here. And they cannot even see the irony and idiocy of their positions.

A prosthetic hand for $50, printed from a computer program. When I was 7 years old, that was not even science fiction. A wonderful, hopeful age if we do not let the deplorables throw it away.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Ah Dean...

 

[waltky]

Old Rocks wrote: A prosthetic hand for $50, printed from a computer program.

An excellent idea!...

... for those smart enough to write the program...

... instead of hacking people.

 

[waltky]

Prosthetics give hope to Boko Haram victims in Nigeria...

Prosthetics gives hope to Boko Haram victims
Wed, May 09, 2018 - Njidda Maidugu breaks into a broad smile as he wobbles on his artificial leg with the support of crutches as a nurse walks alongside, helping him to keep his balance.

Maidugu, 35, never thought he would walk on two legs again after he lost his right limb in a Boko Haram suicide bomb attack at a checkpoint in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria, in 2016. “It feels like a miracle to walk with two legs again, I’m happy,” the fuel station attendant said at the National Orthopedic Hospital in the northern city of Kano. “These are my first steps on two legs in two years and I feel like a toddler learning to walk,” he said, looking down at his new plastic leg outside a prosthetics workshop. Maidugu was one of about 130 people who lost limbs in Boko Haram attacks and have been fitted with free artificial replacements in a project run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The ICRC set up the limb fitting workshop at the hospital in August 2016 to provide prosthetics to amputees from the three northeastern states worst hit by the Muslim insurgency.

The jihadist violence, now in its ninth year, has killed at least 20,000 people and left thousands of others with life-changing injuries. “Half of the 262 patients we have fitted with prosthetics are [Boko Haram] war victims,” project head Jacques Forget said. “The primary focus of the project is to cater for amputees from the conflict, women and children,” he said. The Boko Haram conflict has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people in a region that was already desperately poor even before the violence began. Most of the population in northeast Nigeria live on less than US$2 a day. That makes prosthetic limbs — which cost on average nearly US$700 (585 euros) — prohibitively expensive. As well as those injured by the bombs and bullets of Boko Haram, other beneficiaries include diabetics, victims of car crashes and industrial accidents.

A technician looks at unfinished parts of a prosthetic in the artificial limb fitting workshop operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross inside the Dala National Orthopedic Hospital in Kano, Nigeria​

Babagana Habu, for example, hopped around with the help of a stick for 13 years after losing a leg in an accident with a grinding machine, until he heard about the project. “My parents were too poor to get me crutches to walk with,” said the 25-year-old recharge card vendor from Damaturu, the capital of Yobe State. Most of the cases from the Islamist insurgency have been wounded by gunshots or improvised explosive devices, Forget said. “Not many mines are used in the conflict, unlike in many conflict areas I have worked in,” said Forget, who has worked on artificial limbs for almost 50 years. Amputees are first assessed in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, where the ICRC runs a medical clinic that caters specifically for victims of Boko Haram attacks.

The clinic complements services provided by a handful of state-run hospitals in the city which has been overstretched by the sharp rise in emergency cases from the extremist violence. The conflict has seen an exodus of doctors and other health service personnel from Maiduguri, leaving a huge gap that other medical charities are working to fill. The University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, which treats the bulk of trauma patients, has only one consultant orthopedic surgeon. Once potential beneficiaries of artificial limbs are screened, they are then sent for a fitting in Kano, nearly 600km away. Forget works on average on five amputees a week, which is just a fraction of the number of those seeking his services.

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