The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
HELPING HANDS
Cheshire man uses 3D printer to make prosthetics for kids
NEW HAVEN » Bruce O’Donnell of Cheshire, recently retired from PricewaterhouseCoopers, received a Christmas gift from his wife that is giving him the opportunity to help children around the world.
His new membership to MakeHaven gave him access to the organization’s three-dimensional printers and, together with plans from the Prosthetic Kids Hand Challenge, he’s been creating prosthetic hands for children.
“It was just something that I saw and it looked like there was a need. … I’m kind of a geek to begin with … and there seemed to be a need there that I could help out with.”
After “45 years fixing banks on Wall Street … you feel the need to have to do something useful after a while,” said O’Donnell, who’s 66.
Technology helps those in need
O’Donnell sends his hands to
the Hand Challenge, which tests them and sends them on to those who request them.
Chris Craft, who started the project with a middle school class in Columbia, South Carolina, said the movement has grown so that now there are “900 schools and school districts participating in the Hand Challenge from around the world, representing 48 of the United States and 45 foreign countries.”
The Hand Challenge has sent 400 prosthetics to India, 50 to Nigeria, 25 to Venezuela and hundreds throughout the United States, Craft said.
While huge organizations such as defense contractors and large retailers have taken up the challenge, Craft said printing the hands is “a tangible way for someone to give back that directly goes into the hands of a child in need.”
“Surprisingly, there are a lot of organizations that have gotten involved and a lot of individuals,” Craft said. O’Donnell, he said, is “doing great work.”
O’Donnell has created “about a half-dozen [hands] and I’ve liked two of them. I’ve sent two of them off into the world.” He will talk about the process and demonstrate the prosthetic hand, made from biodegradable plastic, at 7 p.m. Tuesday at MakeHaven, 266 State St.
The instructions, complete with student-made video tutorials in English, Spanish and Portuguese, can be found at www.handchallenge.com. He’s also working with a Boy Scout troop in Delaware, which will assemble the parts that O’Donnell prints.
In order to use the plastic hand, which is built from more than 25 3Dprinted parts, as well as fishing line and tensioners, the child must still have a wrist.
“As they move their wrist it moves the fingers, so you can grab something and hold it,” O’Donnell said. “It really does have a fair amount of strength to it when it’s made correctly.”
“The cool thing about them is they’re relatively inexpensive so you can modify the hell out of them … sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t,” O’Donnell said.
“I’ve been making these things and talking to some of the people in our community about getting involved with it,” he said. “There’s skills to these things that other people probably know better than I do” — tying knots in fishing line, for example.
“How much use does it get before the line starts to stretch? Before the knot starts to loosen up?” Of all the pieces that must be assembled, “the ones that drive you crazy are tensioners, tension pins,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell likes to tinker with the basic design. Holding a blue biodegradable plastic hand he printed, O’Donnell said, “What I use this one for is to break them to see what kind of stresses it can take.
Besides the hands, O’Donnell also has been experimenting with a robotic arm. He also said, “One of the things that I’m thinking of working on is developing a series of specialized clamps that could be used to help people hold musical instruments. … They would be more single purpose.”
He said MakeHaven’s 3D printers, MakerBot Replicator 2’s, are suited for the prosthetic hands he’s making, which will fit a 3- or 4-year-old. “There’s a fair amount of precision that you’re trying to get these machines to do and at the end of the day you’re melting plastic and shooting it through a nozzle.”
“As long as there’s a need and there’s people that can benefit by these things, we’ll keep making them,” he said. “From an expense standpoint, from a materials standpoint, it’s a couple of dollars’ worth of Velcro and some foam [and] fishing string.
The low cost is really important because, as Craft said, “Normal prosthetics can range up to $15,000 or $30,000.”
He said that when he was an intermediate school teacher his students made 75 to 100 of the prosthetics, then they decided, “We need to get other people involved with this like we are.
“We are capable and ready and willing to send hands to anywhere that needs them,” Craft said.
He called O’Donnell “one small cog in a much larger machine of people around the world that are all involved in this kind of work.”