Get the tissues ready for this one. Taylor Morris, a United States veteran and quadruple amputee who lost his limbs in an IED blast while serving in Afghanistan, recently received a 3D printed hand designed by UK-based Open Bionics.
Taylor and his friend Neal Muzzy, an engineer, started by 3D printing Open Bionics’ open-source Dextrus design with the Da Vinci 1.0 3D printer.
Once they figured out this would work, they customized the hand and called it the Dextrus v1.2. According to Open Bionics, Neal plans on further customizing the design by “adding a 2-axis wrist, an elbow strap with push-button tension adjustment, and additional programming to allow for switching between several grip modes.”
“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.”
“For our 3D-printed arm having cost between 1% and 2% of what his last prosthetic arm was, there won’t be any excuse for it not to have all of its features. The use of 3D printing and open-source programming to enable rapid prototyping at low-cost, combined with having an open-source hand design like the Dextrus available to work with, have been crucial to making this project a reality.”
Read more about Taylor’s story here, and watch him and Neal demo the Dextrus v1.2 in the videos below.
