I work in orthotics and prosthetics, I build and fit people for artificial limbs and custom orthopedic braces. It’s a little specialty branch working under orthopedics and rehabilitation. Kinda merges medicine and fabrication using plaster, metal, thermoplastic, composites, leather and fabrics.
Very cool. I have been doing some of that work for 3D printed prosthesis parts. We get scans of the limb and build out from there. I have no clinician skills, we just get direction from somebody in your position and make the models in CAD and then print them.
Oh cool, yeah that side has really taken off in the last couple years. Especially considering a lot of clinics have stopped fabricating in-house. I work for a university hospital, so we have a pretty large fabrication lab and make most of our stuff ourselves, but we’ve experimented with a couple 3d printed prosthetic sockets recently.
We mostly do 3d scans to create positive models, and then fabricate around those if needed. Works really well for anatomy that’s hard to use traditional casting techniques like for cranial helmets. Are most of the people you get scans from using the Structure 3d camera?
The scans we get are highly varied. Some are really decent from higher end scanners, some are mediocre, and some are crappy from a cheap iPad add on device.
Working from poor scans is the biggest time waster for me. It generates a lot of cleanup and guessing
Yeah… The iPad scanners seem to be really inconsistent. Sometimes they seem to be doing an okay job and then an apple update or app update happens and then it’s virtually useless.
Does your company focus on prosthetics, or do you guys do a bit of everything? It’s a small field, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve heard of you guys.
Neat! Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if I got to meet one of your coworkers at a national convention in the future. Seems to be more and more 3d companies sending representatives every year. Cheers.
Drat. What kind of fabrication do you do?
I work in orthotics and prosthetics, I build and fit people for artificial limbs and custom orthopedic braces. It’s a little specialty branch working under orthopedics and rehabilitation. Kinda merges medicine and fabrication using plaster, metal, thermoplastic, composites, leather and fabrics.
Very cool. I have been doing some of that work for 3D printed prosthesis parts. We get scans of the limb and build out from there. I have no clinician skills, we just get direction from somebody in your position and make the models in CAD and then print them.
Oh cool, yeah that side has really taken off in the last couple years. Especially considering a lot of clinics have stopped fabricating in-house. I work for a university hospital, so we have a pretty large fabrication lab and make most of our stuff ourselves, but we’ve experimented with a couple 3d printed prosthetic sockets recently.
We mostly do 3d scans to create positive models, and then fabricate around those if needed. Works really well for anatomy that’s hard to use traditional casting techniques like for cranial helmets. Are most of the people you get scans from using the Structure 3d camera?
Cool stuff.
The scans we get are highly varied. Some are really decent from higher end scanners, some are mediocre, and some are crappy from a cheap iPad add on device.
Working from poor scans is the biggest time waster for me. It generates a lot of cleanup and guessing
Yeah… The iPad scanners seem to be really inconsistent. Sometimes they seem to be doing an okay job and then an apple update or app update happens and then it’s virtually useless.
Does your company focus on prosthetics, or do you guys do a bit of everything? It’s a small field, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve heard of you guys.
We do anything and everything related to engineering or manufacturing. Keeps things interesting.
Orthotics and Prosthetics has been growing though.
Neat! Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if I got to meet one of your coworkers at a national convention in the future. Seems to be more and more 3d companies sending representatives every year. Cheers.
Its a small world sometimes 😀