Earlier this year, we reported on a Canadian team of researchers, led by Faculty of Information Professor Matt Ratto (pictured left), that created the world’s first functional 3D-printed prosthetic leg socket for children in the developing world with trans-tibial amputations.
The “3D PrintAbility” research project uses 3D printer technology to quickly make custom prosthetic sockets to attach to an artificial limb.
The project, which began in January 2014, and included iSchool doctoral student ginger coons, is directed from the iSchool’s Semaphore Lab.
Last fall, Prof. Ratto visited Uganda’s CoRSU hospital, the clinical test site, to check on progress and implementation.
“3Dprintability provides the means to apply the scholarly work we have been doing on ‘critical making’ to real-world problems,” Prof. Ratto says. “We were really happy to see the enthusiastic acceptance of our work by the prosthetists and orthopaedic technologists and technicians at CorSU.”
Developing countries, including Uganda, face an enormous shortage of prosthetic technicians trained to do this, and the work itself takes about six days to manually create the socket. In addition, the end product was sometimes too uncomfortable to wear.
3DPrintAbility addresses these obstacles. The low-cost, time-saving 3D technology can be used by technicians to scan the residual limb and use that model to 3D print a socket that is a custom fit. The precision takes the guess work out of measurements.
And all in six hours.
The 3D printing approach is quicker than the traditional method, requires less technical expertise, is lower in cost due to reduced design time, and results in a better fitting prosthesis. The method means that prosthetists can serve more patients too.
Given that 86 percent of Ugandans rely on subsistence farming, and almost 40 percent make less than $1.25 US a day, this is life changing news for the estimated 250,000 children with various disabilities living in Uganda.
“It was incredible to watch the children getting fitted with our sockets and then, in some cases, walking for the first time. It was a real validation of our collaborative and culturally-sensitive approach to technical development, values that are deeply embedded in both the past and the future of Information Studies as a discipline,” Matt says.
Over the next term, Prof. Ratto and his team will monitor the comfort and durability of the 3D-printed sockets, and make adjustments if necessary, with a plan to offer this technology to other developing countries.
This project is sponsored by cbm Canada (Christian Blind Mission), a Canadian international charity that provides life changing medical treatments in low and middle income countries. The research has been also supported by Grand Challenges Stars in Global Health.
To see how medical history in Uganda is made, watch a video of the 3D leg socket printing project at www.3dprintability.org
All photos taken by ginger coons/Critical Making Lab, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
