Access to professional care and expensive prosthetic devices can be an obstacle in itself for many amputees, and changing systems that provide care can take too long to be helpful to amputees. Desiree Riny has however found a clever work around for lower leg amputees who lack the access to professional care. Desiree Riny, a graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology created a system that allows people without access to healthcare or expensive prosthetics the ability to craft their own DIY prosthetic from bicycle parts and other scrap materials.
She had found that many amputees couldn’t make use of the latest advances of technology because of the expenses or had lived too far away from the existing resources. Finding that 95% of the world’s lower-limb amputees live in such environments without access to professional care.
“Devices produced with advanced technologies such as 3D printing are often difficult to repair and not always suited to rural environments,” Riny stated. “Faced with these limitations, amputees find innovative do-it-yourself responses which are tailored to local materials and traditional practices.” So her solution was to synthesize what these communities had already been doing for years and re-design them so that they fit current medical best practice.
These designs feature the use of materials such as bicycle parts, which in countries like India, Cambodia and South Africa, are key modes of transportation, so many are familiar with taking them apart. The prosthetic designs also feature the use of scrap wood, worn clothing, rice bags, and scrap metal.
Riny’s thesis is titled Reclaiming Accessibility: To Lower Limb Prosthetics. Her research spanned communities in Sudan, South Sudan, Cameroon, India and Cambodia.
Her thesis statement serves as a wonderful way of working with amputees who are poor or lack the ability to seek professional help or acquire more expensive 3D printed prosthetics. The booklet “D.I.Y Prosthetic Manual” is made to be available online or distributed at NGO’s as well as local businesses. However I was unable to find the actual booklet and was only able to find articles about said booklet. This serves as one of the few downsides to Desiree Riny’s project, because the search engine optimization isn’t corrected to have the booklet available as one of the first searches it might be harder to find or access for the people who need it. Another issue with the booklet is the lack of any translated versions of the instruction manual, language barriers may make the ability to craft the prosthetics harder. However she does her best to remedy this by including plenty of Illustrated images of the crafting of the prosthetic.
