New dimension of medical science: 3D printing
Although 3D printing — as a concept — has been around since the 80s, 3D printers haven’t really been available commercially, until these past few years. In India, young Bangalore-based entrepreneurs Nikhil Velpanur and Arvind Nadig made Brahma3 Anvil, the country’s first commercial 3D printer, only last year. According to an article published in The Hindu Business Line last month, their first batch of 3D printers will only ship out next month.
The ability to manufacture a three-dimensional object of any conceivable shape is every bit as versatile as it sounds. 3D Systems, in association with the medical technology firm Ekso Bionics, recently served a reminder of the power and the precision of this technique. As has been widely reported in international journals, their project — to build a robotic suit using a 3D-printed exoskeleton — has enabled 46-year-old Amanda Boxtel to walk again, 22 years after a skiing accident left her paralysed from the waist down.
In a 3D Systems press re- lease about the successful Budapest trial, the manufacturing process was outlined. “To obtain the perfect fit for Amanda, our designers used 3D scanning to digitise the contours of Amanda’s thighs, shins and spine and create a personalised threedimensional base to inform the shape of the required assemblies. Sophisticated mechanical actuators and controls, manufactured and provided by Ekso Bionics, were then integrated with the more fluid components that were 3D printed from the
You get the feeling that had the exoskeleton not worked out as planned, Boxtel would have shrugged off the experiment with a joke and gone back to being a really, really strong person who just happened to be wheelchair-bound.
customised scans to create the first ever bespoke suit.” A much-watched video shows Boxtel trying on the suit, and then walking upright, using it to regain what she called “authentic functionality” of her body.
The video, like many corporate videos, makes a cloying spectacle of Boxtel’s “miracle walk”, instead of telling us more about the ingenious scanning process that enabled such a high degree of customisation for her Ekso-suit. It can be forgiven, though — Boxtel’s is a quintessential underdog story. She is a motivational speaker, and has been lecturing on adversity, and how to overcome it, for many years now. You get the feeling that had the exoskeleton not worked out as planned, Boxtel would have shrugged off the experiment with a joke and gone back to being a really, really strong person who just happened to be wheelchair-bound.
Thankfully, Ekso Bionics delivered their second highprofile breakthrough in less than a month. Earlier in February, they had successfully tested a state-of-the-art “bionic hand”, a sensoryenhanced artificial limb. The test subject was Dennis Aabo Sørensen, an amputee who, like Boxtel, had an old injury; he had an accident while handling fireworks in 1995. The process itself was arguably more intricate than the one used to build Boxtel’s Ekso-suit. The results of the test, as Sørensen described in a Medical Daily article, were most encouraging indeed, although the bionic hand hasn’t yet cleared the safety trials necessary to market the product.
“The sensory feedback was incredible. I could feel things that I hadn’t been able to feel in over nine years. When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square.”
Both Ekso Bionics and 3D Systems, can, for the time being, bask in the glow of their success. The crucial thing, however, remains the speed and the price at which they bring their products into the market. Should that happen satisfactorily, the Ekso-skeleton may soon be regarded as one of the more significant inventions of the 21st century.