ExpHand Prosthetics were crowned this year’s Med-Tech Innovation Award winners in the 3D printing category.
The company has developed affordable, expandable, customisable, 3D printed prosthetics for children aged three to ten, with an adjustable universal socket that can be fitted at home by parents.
Kate Walker, who founded the business during her final year at university, gave us her reaction to winning the prize and a little more insight into how ExpHand came to life.
First of all, congratulations on winning the award, how do you feel?
Thank you very much, we were so excited when we found out that we’d won the award, there were so many fantastic finalists this year!
Tell us a bit about there the idea for ExpHand came from?
We were inspired to create the ExpHand after meeting a little girl called Zoey who was born missing her left arm below the elbow and hadn’t been offered a prosthetic before. We did some research and found that current prosthetics expensive, custom fit and children tend to grow out of them after about a year, so we set out to design something more suitable. The ExpHand is a 3D printed prosthetic that is adjustable and so it grows with a child as they do, meaning it has a much longer useful lifetime than current products.
Give us some insight as to why you opted for 3D printing to develop the product?
When we first started developing the ExpHand we were looking for a quick and easy way to prototype our design and test out new ideas and 3D printing was a great way to make that happen. We had access to a lab full of machines and so we could make design changes on a Monday and have a part ready for testing on a Tuesday which really helped us move forward with our development at a fast pace.
Additionally, the design freedom we were able to get by using 3D printing to manufacture our devices let us do some really interesting things such as having joints inbuilt into the prosthetic which is something we wouldn’t be able to do with traditional manufacturing. We were also able to customise the infill of the prosthetic to remove unnecessary weight and strengthen specific areas of the prosthetic where we felt it was beneficial, again this is something that we’d have really struggled to achieve using any other method of manufacturing.
Finally, with 3D printing we’re able to really easily customise each prosthetic whether it be by colour or by size so that we can create a product suitable for each individual child.
Being able to develop the prosthetics in house, does that make it easier to tailor them to suit the needs of the user?
Definitely! By developing our products in house we’re able to adjust the design of each prosthetic to suit the child. It also means that we can see our products being manufactured in real time and easily pick up on any design changes that we’d like to make in the future. By having manufacturing in house we’re able to cut out the delays of going back and forth between an external supplier and this means our turnaround times can stay short which means we can get prosthetics out to our customers faster.
What future developments can we expect from ExpHand going forward? Could you expand the age range for example?
Currently the ExpHand is suitable for children between three and ten years old who have a below elbow limb difference and we’re looking to expand both the age range that our product is suitable for and the limb differences that we can accommodate with our prosthetics in the future. As well as this we’re always looking to improve our product so we continually look for feedback from our users to shape the design of our future products.
