[Neal Muzzy], a local member of the new Waterloo Iowa makerspace, just made news on Open Bionics for his robotic prosthetic hand called Dextrus v1.2 which he made for his friend, and wounded war veteran, [Taylor].
In just two months, [Neal] worked with his friend to make this robotic prosthetic with the goal of having it more functional and easier to use than [Taylor]’s current prosthetic. The very first prototype was made by using the open-source Dextrus design, to test fit, and control using EMG sensors. Once they determined it would work — onto customizing!
They call it Dextrus V1.2, and it works better for [Taylor] than the original — but that’s the whole point of the Open Hand project — starting with a base design, and making it better. If you’re not familiar with the Open Hand Project, it was originally crowd-funded on Indiegogo, and is now an organization to make robotic prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees. We wrote about it in Hacklet 41 – Prosthetic Projects.
Now this robotic prosthetic might be rather limited, but like [Neal] says:
In its completed form, this arm may not end up being the go-to for daily usage compared to the professional-made prosthetics that Taylor has, but that’s fine because this project will have served as the test bed for trying out new features and creating a control program to work as easily and intuitively as possible.
The next time Taylor is having a professional-made prosthetic arm put together, he will be able to provide this 3D-printed arm as an example of every feature and program behavior that he will want the new arm to include.
But, in the meantime, [Neal] is already working on adding a 2-axis wrist and multiple grip modes to the prosthetic. Awesome.
[Thanks for the tip Nathan!]
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Medical hacks
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