Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “e-Nable Putting Prosthetics Within Reach”.
All right so my name’s andrea sebastian, i’m here with uh, enable um we’re a large open source uh distributed community uh entirely based on the web um, and we make low-cost 3d printed prosthetic hands. This is a large large version that we just brought for demo purposes today. This is a two-scale version. That’S actually made for an individual missing, missing their fingers, and so you can see by bending at the wrist you can enable gross grasp and it’s entirely body driven. So, there’s no, no electronics, no motors, uh, no sensors, so those are all things that contribute to it being uh, incredibly low cost compared to existing commercial systems.
So this whole device costs, probably under 150. You can make them much much cheaper, though we will mainly deal with uh children who are affected by something called amniotic band syndrome um. So it’s a birth defect in which the uh gel was born without any any fingers, but with a fully functioning palm. So they have um muscles and a palm that we can then harness to drive, drive this mechanism, and this is actually a really old design. That originated, i think, in australia, there’s a really old pad from the late 1800s that describes this device. This body-powered prosthetic. You know it’s a community. That’S really not been served by the uh kind of by commercial solutions um, because children outgrow prosthetics at such a rate.
It’S just like outgrowing shoes, every six to eight months um. It really doesn’t make sense to have shoes that are forty thousand dollars um. You know it’s uh we’ve had people in our community actually purchase uh 3d printers just exclusively for designing and making new hands for their their children as they as they grow. So it’s uh in terms of the kind of the nature of the problem, the nature of technology they’re very well suited to each other. You know customization distributed manufacturing, um and cheap low cost. You .