$25 prosthetic leg

Keep it there I have loads of ideas just not enough time.

No worries. I just need one idea by someone else, and I'll arbitrarily give this its own forum, so we start brainstorming on things like a $25 prosthetic leg or something.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2010 02:19AM by SebastienBailard.

Oh that reminds me when I did my apprenticeship in the early 70's. I worked with a guy who used to work on his tin leg at lunch times modifying bits of it or just doing running repairs .. no pun intended ..

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Bodge It [reprap.org]
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BIQ Sanguinololu SD LCD board	BIQ Stepcon	BIQ Opto Endstop
BIQ Heater Block PCB	BIQ Extruder Peek clamp replacement	BIQ Huxley Seedling
BIQ Sanguinololu mounting	BIQ standalone Sanguinololu or Ramps mounting	Print It Stick It Cut it

My rep strap: [repstrapbertha.blogspot.com]

Buy the bits from B&Q pipestrap [diyrepstrap.blogspot.com]
How to Build a Darwin without any Rep Rap Parts [repstrapdarwin.blogspot.com]
Web Site [www.takeaway3dtech.com]

For folk who want to research the subject:

Investigators in neuromuscular biomechanics bring together computational physics, neuroscience, and robotics to analyze muscle form and function, study human movement, design medical technologies, and guide surgery. This driving biological problem seeks fundamental understanding of the mechanisms involved in the production of movement, and is motivated by opportunities to improve treatments for individuals with cerebral palsy, stroke, osteoarthritis, and Parkinson’s disease. Prof. Scott Delp, a pioneer in the development of methods for modeling motor systems is the lead investigator of this multi-institutional effort.

These people are cool:
[en.wikipedia.org]
[simtk.org]

Naturally, Peter Eastman of ArtOfIllusion is one of the developers.
[simtk.org]

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Here are the Open Prosthetic people:
[openprosthetics.org]

They're either stalled, or working frantically behind the scenes to polish a new release, or who knows?
[openprosthetics.org]

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The RepRap.org server is a perfect place to host things like prosthetic legs, so if we start a collaboration with them, it is highly beneficial if we keep a (primary) mirror of project(s) up on RepRap.org . Because that's what RepRap.org is for.

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For interested parties and prosthetic hackers, please tack up your drawings in this thread / the wiki.

A few months before Christmas I saw on another forum a request for help with making a prosthetic for a woman who had cancer of the eye, she wanted something to wear to stop people starring, as if its not bad enough going through the ordeal of surgery etc, her hospital had not helped her apparently.
This got me thinking of a printer that could build prosthetics from scans, there must be others in this position, my first thoughts were of a powder printer using gelatin ground into a fine powder, but the real issue is a print head that can deposit multiple materials, to simulate skin, bone etc, and the materials that are suitable for the task, no small task, but the potential to help those who have suffered in some way is worth the effort, I can't think of anything more worthy of that effort.

The two main issues;
Develop a multi material deposition head.
Research and trial materials

Anyone up for this?????

I find the potential for prosthetics one of the most fascinating prospects for RepRap and other such projects. As a vet of Iraq, I am keenly aware of the need for cheap prosthetics, not just here but across the world. In an Industrial Design History class I took, one of the students (who has spent his whole life in a wheelchair) gave a presentation on the evolution of the wheelchair, pointing out it was the veterans of Vietnam (many homeless) who began "chopping" their rides. It had me thinking, if we could get IVAW, veterans, VA doctors, activists involved in a project like this, we could actually use it as an excuse to broaden these replication technologies to third world countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan) under the guise of cultural collaboration / getting over our demons.

It seems like a coal and waste oil furnace to do castings may be a cheaper way to make prosthetic legs as they can be made from brick and sand and so the only initial investment is in the fuel and aluminum or zinc to do the casting with. Certainly this is not a particularly lightweight nor cosmetic solution, just an inexpensive one. Certainly within the $25 range and available to regions with no infrastructure.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2010 06:12PM by Mechanikyle.

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I am new to the RapRap project and am interested in building one. I am also a Mechanical Engineering Student and Machinist with a 13x40 lathe and Bridgeport mill. Contact me if you need parts machined for your RepRap project.

Interesting project.

I saw in New Scientist this week that someone like DARPA has a "$6million dollar man" prosthetic leg that works off brain scanning! On the flip side, I knew a guy with one of those mechanical claws that replaced his lower arm. It was wood and burnished steel.

On the Bits From Bytes forum there is a chap designing an artificial robot arm, so far he has printed out the fingers, and got a few tendons working. If he gives the design freely, then it wold be possible to scale it in a cad package and print an arm and hand roughly the right size. Obviously it would be possible to also print whatever sized interface was required fairly easily, perhaps from a picture with a scale in the shot, or from a direct print taken from a cast or even leaning on a scanner bed. This would allow a limb that actually did useful things for perhaps $100, and a small clinic could be set up to make bespoke limbs for the needy with a thousand dollar (or less) RepRap + laptop.