3D Printed Fingers Help Kate a 2 Year old Play Like Other Children

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Kate is a 2 year old girl, excitable, energetic, and playful like the other girls her age, however Kate was born without fingers on her left hand. Her parents could not afford a traditional prosthetic device so they Turned to a man named Jason Hundley for help:

http://3dprint.com/1622/3d-printed-f...ama-girl-play/

Hundley printed Kate a prosthetic device on a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer. the prosthetic costs just $5 in materials to make, and has allowed Kate to play like all the other children her age. Here is a picture of Kate and her 3D printed fingers:

[old man emu]

I absolutely love to read stories like this. Who ares if a multi-national company comes up with a new design for a schnugel valve and saves 0.2 cents per unit? 3D printing has improved the quality of life for this little girl, and will continue to do so as she grows. Maybe be the time she is a young lady, 3D printing will be able to provide skin made from her own stem cells to make her prosthetic undetectable.

If a complicated device like a hand can be printed for $5, imagine how little it would cost to improve the lives of children in war-torn Third World countries who have lost body parts due to land mines!

Old Man Emu

[Maggie]

If a complicated device like a hand can be printed for $5, imagine how little it would cost to improve the lives of children in war-torn Third World countries who have lost body parts due to land mines!

Old Man Emu

Yep, this is what is so great about tech advances. In the next few years so many people's lives are going to be made better off. In the next few decades, the majority of the planet will be living lives they deserve to live, free of chronic ailments, starvation, and poverty. 3D printing will play a huge role in all of this in my humble opinion.

[RobH2]

I agree. So many times the market (the American market anyway) feels justified to label something as "medical" and then charge a 1000x markup. If those same fingers had been made and distributed by a medical prosthetic company, they would have charged here family $5000 for them. I hope that things like this bring some common sense into the market and that people who truly need help and have no resources can get prosthetics that improve their lives.

No doubt those fingers and that same design could have been made many other ways without a 3d printer. It is not solely because of 3d printing that those fingers could exist or have been made. But, the immediacy and simple workflow of 3d printers is enticing people to make things that they just wouldn't tackle if they had to carve a part, cast a mold, pour it and finish it. It takes too long to prototype that way and frequently, that prototype is not usable as the final product. It's just a visual representation. It then frequently needs to be injection molded, etc.

The 3d printer is doing for us what 3d software did for us beginning around 1994. It gives us a quick way to play "what-if." Now we can truly conceive, model, rotate and print ideas in hours that in the decades past were tedious and lengthy endeavors that often took months. 3d printing in combination with 3d software is going to revolutionize product development. And I am thrilled that the little girl got some simplistic fingers for $5. You can't put a price on that but for $5 it makes me smile.