Trautman Hook (OpenProsthetics)

This is the Trautman Hook that was put in the public domain and can be found on http://openprosthetics.org/

This is not as much an object that I hope people will be printing, I sincerely hope to call out to those those with designs skill, prototyping capacity and vision to collaboratively create innovative, useful and affordable prosthetic 'systems'. I hope that you will not limit your ideas to just the rapid prototyped parts but use all of your making experience. I hope this will be the start of a discussion of what the RepRap/Makerbot/BfB/etc. (and commercial RP/AM) community can do for for those who are unfortunate. I'm confident that we can exchange valuable ideas! Most of us have spare motors, controller boards and various other electronic and mechanical parts, moreover they are similar so we could reproduce each others' solutions including non-RP parts!

Some questions for discussion:
- How do we make it fit perfectly? (e.g. 3D scanning a clay negative imprint, sparse structure against sweating, etc.)
- What would the ultimate prosthetic 2.0 (sorry for the buzz words!) that you can make for a low budget (e.g. 300 euro's) look like, given the collective tools, personal networks and knowledge that we have?
- Given that we have access to Arduino's (nano would be appropriate), encoders, servo's, accelerometers, gyro's, RFID chips (context aware prosthetics) and varous other tools.
- Can we make prosthetics cool (an not necessarily creepy at the same time). LED's, smooth organic shapes. Not all of us want to look like the Borg.
- Do we know amputees willing to try them and provide directions? (I do, for a lower arm amputee)
- RP parts as light weight sparse structures e.g. ready for fibre layup (composites, etc.). I know it seems much more daunting and serious than the mouse trap challenge that did so well and was a lot of fun. I hope you don't feel like it has to be done right at once and just try out a few things. Please do have fun and try out crazy ideas!
- How do we increase the contact surface to improve grip. Currently small contacts point will allow you to either crush or drop an object and hardly anything in between. Obviously, intricate structures with flexible parts can be made fairly easily with 3D printing.

I don't intend to just replicate a discussion here while the Open Prosthetics community has their own group. So please get involved in the discussions there if you're interested!

The image with the foosball table is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Army_prosthetic.jpg

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