Immediately after South Africa-based carpenter Richard van As lost four fingers while sawing wood, he began thinking of a solution to make himself a new hand.
But following the 2011 incident, van As couldn't find any prosthetic fingers to buy online and discovered that prosthetic limbs cost tens of thousands of dollars, CNN reported.
He didn't get anywhere until he found Ivan Own, a mechanical effects artist living in Washington State. The two men worked together first to create mechanical fingers for van As, and then to introduce a company that makes prosthetics through 3-D printing.
Robohand, which the pair founded in 2012, makes mechanical prosthetic fingers, hands and arms through 3-D printing and offers the limbs for affordable prices. Customers ordering a printed limb can fill out measurement forms and send in 3-D scans of their hands to be entered into the software.
The process is intentionally simple and red tape-free; for example, a full adult hand costs around $2,000, is printed in about five and half hours and can be put together in 10-15 hours.
New body parts are created with the thermoplastic material Polylactide and then assembled with stainless steel and aluminum by the customers themselves.
"Within five minutes of getting it fitted, people can actually use it," communications manager Leonard Nel told CNN. "It's anatomically driven by the wrist, elbow, or shoulder once fitted," he said, meaning that the wearer can control the limb's movements.
Besides offering prosthetic limbs at affordable rates, Robohand has made all of its designs available to the public so they can be used by anyone with a 3-D printer.
"We stopped counting at 200 hands that were made back in November 2013," van As told CNN. "But we can see there have now been over 143,000 downloads of the software. People all over the world are doing this without us. We don't even know of them all."
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