Meeting the unmet 3D printing solves medical challenge Bluefrog Design, a product innovation consultancy based in Leicester, has used 3D printing to help a man with a longstanding skin complaint, succeeding where a host of traditional approaches had previously failed. The patient suffered from a serious case of paresthesia, which affected his quality of life and severely impacted on his ability to cope with normal day-to-day activities. Paresthesia is an abnormal and uncomfortable sensation, often feeling like tingling, tickling, prickling, numbness or burning of the skin with no apparent physical cause. In this particular case, it produced a prickling sensation from the rib cage to the collarbone whenever the man’s clothes came into contact with his body. In order to alleviate his condition, Bluefrog designed and built a structure, cage-like in appearance, that stopped his garments from touching his upper torso, thereby improving his wellbeing and comfort. First of all, they identified the patient’s most sensitive areas and 3D-scanned his body to find the desensitised locations from which they could hang a support to keep his clothes away from his skin. Using remote scanning rather than contact measuring, they were able to avoid touching him and causing any further
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irritation, while capturing precise data to use in the design with 3D CAD. What they produced was entirely bespoke, following the contours of the patient’s body, as well as being costeffective and time-efficient. The part was 3D printed in-house using medical-grade material, and hung from the patient where he suffered no irritation. The design was lattice-based and therefore light, giving a material saving of up to 60 per cent compared to traditional production methods. This also provided ventilation to keep the patient cool, as air can flow through the device between the clothes and the body. 3D printing is key to Bluefrog Design’s core business, beyond medical work and into other sectors too. As an industrial and product design consultancy, they often design prototypes and produce short run, high value products. Frequently very technical, these are the kind of products
that traditional processes cannot produce as quickly or economically as 3D printing can.
An advantage of 3D printing is that ten or more of the same product can be made, and then if further iterations are required, the 3D CAD can be tweaked so that a variant of the original product can easily be manufactured, assembled and finished. It would be technically challenging to adopt the same approach with injection moulding, as this would require frequent and costly modifications.
www.bluefrogdesign.co.uk