Lightweight and cut costs of 3D printed orthotics and prosthetics

Custom orthopedic devices, such as orthoses and prosthetics, are expensive to manufacture using traditional means. By digitizing your design and manufacturing using 3D printing processes, you can minimize manual labor, cut costs, and scale your production.

In this nTop Live, Gabrielle Thelen, application engineer at nTop, shows you how to apply different design approaches to reduce weight, increase patient comfort and improve overall ergonomics, breathability, and aesthetics of an AFO (Ankle Foot Orthosis). 

She uses volume lattices and structural ribbing to lightweight various features of the AFO by spatially varying the density and thickness of the lattice beams and ribs. The result is a 53% weight savings between the original design and the new one.

Watch and learn how to:

• Reduce the weight of 3D printed prosthetics & orthotics
• Spatially control important design parameters using field-driven design
• Calculate mass and weight saving of the original design to the optimized design

Download the files

Recreate the steps that Gabrielle followed in this nTop Training. To download all the necessary files for this training, please see this link.