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From $20,000 to $2,350 (or $150 if you borrow the printer).
From months of design and mill work to 20 minutes of 3D printing.
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The story of Richard Van As, Ivan Owen and Leon McCarthy is the perfect illustration of how 3D printers are tearing up the business of healthcare, particularly the world of prosthetic makers.
NPR had the story first before the CBS Evening News and gives full credit to both inventors of the RoboHand. But with the CBS video, you get to see the adorable 12-year-old beam at the reporter and whisper, “Cyborg.”
That’s the cute part. The scary part is when Leon’s dad compares the cost of printing and assembling the prosthetic hand, “This thing cost us like 5 bucks, 10 bucks, whatever — it was nothing,” Paul McCarthy said. He estimated that a prosthetic hand would have cost $20,000 or $30,000. The plans for Leon’s hand are available to download for free on Thingiverse.
His son closes the interview with the killing blow to device makers, and the most important factor when the subject is making medical devices for growing children.
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“When I outgrow a hand, we can easily make a new one,” Leon said.
Of course, plans for the next robotic limb may not be free, and certainly the designers of such a complex device deserve to be paid for their work. However, it’s easy to imagine patients – or anyone who needs access to a 3D printer – pooling resources to buy one and a matching community of makers who would charge reasonable prices for access to the designs.
In the meantime, watch the video to see the charming Leon, and read the NPR story for all the details about how the RoboHand came to life:
Richard Van As was working in his home near Johannesburg, South Africa, in May of 2011, when he lost control of his table saw. The carpenter lost two fingers and mangled two more on his right hand. As soon as he got out of the hospital, Van As began researching prosthetics online. They cost thousands of dollars — money he didn’t have.
Van As came across a YouTube video from Ivan Owen. In the video, Owen, a special effects artist and puppeteer in Bellingham, Wash., was demonstrating one of his creations, a big puppet hand that relies on thin steel cables to act like tendons.The two began working together long distance — Skyping, sharing ideas, even sending parts back and forth. Finally, Owen flew to South Africa to finish the work in person with Van As. And today, Van As has a working mechanical finger to assist him with his work.
But something else happened on Owen’s visit to South Africa: While he was there, Van As received a call from a woman seeking help for her 5-year-old son, Liam Dippenaar, who was born without fingers on his right hand. The cause was a rare congenital condition called amniotic band syndrome. In ABS, fibrous bands can wrap around a hand or a foot in utero and cut off circulation.Van As says he and Owen looked at each other and were of one mind: “‘Yeah, easy, no problem.'” Within days, they developed a crude mechanical hand for Liam, with five aluminum fingers that opened and closed with the up and down movement of Liam’s wrist.
When Owen flew back to the United States, he wondered if the device could be turned into printable parts. So he emailed MakerBot, a firm that makes 3-D printing equipment, to see if the company would help out. It did, offering both Owen and Van As a free 3-D printer.
What had previously taken the pair a week’s time or more — milling finger pieces, adjusting and tweaking parts — now took 20 minutes to redesign, print and test.
Eventually, Liam’s crude hand was replaced with the 3D printed version, which Van As and Owen call “Robohand.”
They posted the design and instructions for Robohand on Thingiverse, a website for sharing digital designs. Anyone can download the plans and — with a 3-D printer and about $150 in parts — make a hand.
Videographer Paul McCarthy and his 12-year-old son, Leon, live in Marblehead, Mass. They discovered Robohand on the Web and decided to make one for Leon, who was born with no fingers on his left hand.
