Over at Makerbot Industries, Bre Petis has taken an interest in using a Makerbot to print designs from the Open Prosthetics Project. He has uploaded one device to Thingiverse, the Trautman Hook, and put out a challenge to 3d printer experimenters everywhere to figure out how the technology can be used to help give people access to public domain prosthetics:
The most MakerBottable prosthetic appears to be the Trautman Hook and the project has already created files using Alibre and made them available for download. Getting them made in metal would cost between $435 and $7213 depending on the process you use to get them made out of metal, but the cost will be less than a dollar in plastic for anyone who makes them on a MakerBot. Is plastic a viable option? Can MakerBotted plastic be cast in metal? These are frontiers waiting for MakerBot Operators to explore and share back to the prosthetics ning community that the open prosthetics project has set up. They've also set up a wiki for documentation of the Trautman Hook.
More:
- An Open-Source Approach To Better Prosthetics
- Designing a better world
- Plastic soda bottle prosthesis
- The Open Prosthetics Project
- Medical and Bio: Open source hardware 2009 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009