So we have been hearing a fair amount about 3D printers recently and how they might be used in the medical industry. Now as far as prosthetic limbs are concerned, they do get pretty expensive especially when it involves movable parts, like in the case of Jose Delgado Jr. Jose was born without a left hand and in the past year, he had been using a prosthetic hand that costs $42,000.
The device receives signals from the muscles in Jose’s forearm and will allow the mechanical fingers of the device to move like a real hand would. Perhaps interested in seeing how a 3D printed limb might hold out against a more expensive and hi-tech one, Jeremy Simon from 3DUniverse decided to pay Jose a visit and offered to print him the Cyborg Beast prosthetic hand made from ABS plastic which only costs about $50 to print.
So how does the device fare against the $42,000 prosthetic limb? Well it turns out that Jose is actually liking the Cyborg Beast a lot more than his $42,000 limb. Jose claims that the Cyborg Beast is more comfortable and performed better. However he did note that some pieces do break off due to its material, but printing it is easy and not to mention very affordable.
At the moment Simon is working with Jose on printing a new hand, this time from a material called Bridge nylon which is supposed to be even stronger than the previous one. If anything this just serves to show that prosthetic limbs can be 3D printed at a very low cost, which means that people living in war torn countries or army veterans will be able to get access to replacement limbs much easily. In the meantime you can check out the video above to see Jose comparing his $50 hand to his $42,000 hand.
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