The very first arm exoskeleton for kids with SMA I’ve discovered was Angel Arms. Designed by two biomedical engineering students Joseph Kissing and Brooks Schaefer at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan was simple and beautiful piece of engineering. Its minimalist design use rubber bends to compensate hand weight thus allows less force to move.   SMA – Spinal Muscular Atrophy is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by loss of motor neurons and progressive muscle wasting. Kids with SMA have very weak muscles and often couldn’t move their arms themselves. Thanks to initiatives like Angel Arms they can finally play, draw and throw a ball, but it’s still emerging field. There are medical companies that produce similar devices but they need a lot of measurements and custom fitting and can’t be ordered remotely because proper setup in their case is crucial and simply they doesn’t work if they’re misaligned. Moreover they need to be replaced multiple ti...

  It all started one late evening I was away from pleasures of town life in the middle of boat design project at the back of beyond. I had a call that if not changed my life it gave me an opportunity to take one of the greatest design challenges so far. It was mother of spinal muscular atrophy sick boy and I offered help in field of making custom devices for him. Wait. Why me and not any of professional suppliers of such products? Simply because most of products needed in this case didn’t exist or weren’t available in Poland. The women heard that I had been “doing something with 3D” and I really always wanted to work on human oriented positive impact projects. We talked about several, but the most important was exoskeleton.   The device that allows to move arms people with muscular atrophy. Sometimes called “dynamic arm support”. Small scale research in that field spread already after 3D printers commercialized, there were two major projects of low budget orthopedic exosk...