my name is joel gibbard, and i'm the ceoof open bionics and we're using 3d printing to create prosthetic limbs at open bionics, we're creating the next generationof prosthetic limbs i like to compare a prosthetic to a shoe because it has a very similar function, it issomething that you wear over part of your body you have to wear it all day long, and it has to bevery comfortable you have to like the way that it looks, and becomfortable wearing it both physically and socially the product we're developing at the moment, which isthe bionic hand, is for transradial amputees these are people that have an upper-limb differencewhere they still have some of their forearm
but they may be missing anywherefrom their hand upwards so they still have an elbow joint, and this is wherethe prosthetic socket connects to their arm but they don't have a hand we have sensors that we place on the wearer's musclesin their arm and when they flex their muscles, we detect an electricalsignal from the surface of their skin and that's what makes the hand move the hand itself has control of each finger independently and the wearer can give it commandsto do different things so they can move the fingers of the handwith varying power and speed
so they can move it really slowlyor quickly and with a lot of power and they can switch between different gripping modesso they can do pinch grips and tripod grips to pick up smaller objects and do fine tasks we use our ultimakers to print all of themanufactured parts inside of the hand we have the actuatorswhich is a component that we buy the circuit boards we've designedand we get those made externally but all of the mechanical componentswe 3d print using our ultimaker printers we use 2 different materials at the moment we have pla plastic and a tpu called ninjaflex,which is a flexible plastic
we use a combination of thosefor different parts of the hand that need to be soft or rigid we use the flexible parts for the joints of the fingers this means we don't have loads ofdifferent parts to manufacture either we can print the finger as an entire unitwith all of the joints built in
cost to 3d print an object,and then it just works straight off the print bed it's so awesome seeing the reactions from peoplewearing it and trying it out for the first time some people have never worn a bionic hand before and seeing the satisfaction on their facewhen they get it to move is really cool
