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3D printing with times and costs halved and sustainable materials. The interview with the inventor.
The nineteenth Italian edition of the James Dyson Award, the competition that aims to reward engineering projects that focus on sustainability and society, saw D-Pulp, the invention of product designer Simone Perini, triumph. An ambitious project that aims to improve the current manufacturing process, currently mostly artisanal, offering personalized and aesthetically pleasing prostheses.
During his university career, Perini had the opportunity to develop various projects in the medical field, but the internship at the INAIL Prosthetic Center in Vigorso di Budrio was particularly fruitful, where the 27-year-old designer took a specific interest in the prosthesis sector. «I explored this topic in depth by trying to integrate the skills of a designer into a process that initially did not include this figure. My main motivation was to offer patients the possibility of obtaining personalized prostheses, adapted to their needs and with great attention to aesthetics.”
The objective of Perini and the team of the Research Area of the Inail Prosthetic Center is to overcome the traditional production processes of prostheses, which are currently mainly artisanal. A process that involves high production costs and mostly long lead times, with numerous factors that can slow down the production process, such as the availability of materials, the clinical conditions of the stump, the experience of the orthopedic technician and the customizations requested by the patient. With the use of scanners and 3D printing, the prosthesis production process is streamlined and the advantages are evident, primarily in terms of costs and timing: «The new process would have approximately a 65% reduction in production times and a containment of costs of 45%”, explains Perini, but also lighter and more sustainable customizable materials and the repeatability of the process via digital archive. «The digital archive is fundamental as it allows orthopedic technicians to have a history of their patients’ prostheses. In this way, in the event of renewal or breakage of the prosthesis, the archive allows us to avoid the traditional copying process, moving directly to the 3D printing of digital models, streamlining a process that would have been longer and more expensive”, explains the designer, who with the Inail Prosthetic Center team are carrying out the first fundamental user tests to collect the feedback necessary to increasingly optimize the process. «The ambition – concludes Perini – is to integrate the system within the normal production processes of the structure as a personalized digital service/process, and perhaps in the future see disabled/assisted people wearing 3D printed prostheses thanks to the D-system Pulp.”
With 40 million amputees in the world, estimated by the World Health Organization, and an average of 15,000 operations per year for amputations in Italy, the D-Pulp solution can truly be an effective and decisive response, capable of solving a decisive problem for thousands of people in the world, as the jury’s note points out: “An intelligent solution that puts the individual at the centre, significantly improving both the process and the aesthetic-functional quality of a system that is as complex as it is essential for people”.