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 exoskeletons Angel
Arms and Magic Arms. 3D printing development was a significant factor
for both, providing possibility of much faster iterations of
prototyping and testing so important in proper fit and function
optimization.
I felt that it’s still much to do in refinement the exoskeleton. I
want to share my experience and experiments on this blog. Hope it
would be an interesting lecture for engineers, therapists,
orthopedists and last but not least patients and their families.
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