In recent days, reports have told the story of how Debbie Harry, the “chicken living on an urban farm owned by Rachel Diepstra and located in the greater Grand Rapids area, MI” has had new 3d printed prosthetic feet created for her by a group of engineering students.
3D Data to the Rescue
“Debbie” the chicken chose to roost on her owner’s garage when bullied by her fellow brood of chickens, and sadly lost her feet to frostbite. Being her son’s favourite chicken, owner Rachel decided to give Debbie the best chance at survival by taking to social media to ask for help. Fortunately, her call for help happened to be answered by a robotics lecturer who saw Debbie’s case as a chance for his students to learn more about “real-world applications of 3D modelling, prototyping and 3d printing” (all3dp.com).
Three students from West Michigan Aviation Academy rose to the challenge and began to work on prototypes, before eventually racking up thirty different prosthetics until they arrived at the ideal solution for Debbie. 3D modeling, 3D printing and prototyping allowed them to try several options and iteratively improve on their solution within an efficient window of time.
This is a heart warming story where 3D printing prosthetics came to the rescue of the Chicken called Debbie Harry but the 3D Measurement Company are involved in similar applications for human patients on a regular basis.
3D Optical Scanning
3D optical scanning is used to create a mirror image of a patient’s body part for either reconstruction or prosthetics and the scan data is fed into a 3D printer to produce the prosthesis. The T3DMC 3D Optical scanning systems are all non contact so are able to capture very fine detail scan data to produce very realistic representations so if you have the need to create some 3D data for this or any other applications, please call us on 01746 762251 or via email at info@t3dmc.com
To read the full story and for the original source, go to http://all3dp.com/4/students-3d-print-prosthetic-feet-debbie-harry-chicken/
