A Preliminary Usability Assessment of a 3D Printable Orthosis Design System

The standard treatment for bones fractures entails the use of a tailor-made plaster cast which has several disadvantages: its weight generally causes discomfort, it cannot be taken off without breaking it, it can cause skin rashes and prevents ventilation of the treated area. Therefore, the application of traditional casts to orthopaedics patients does not represent, to date, the best option. To overcome the above-mentioned drawbacks, many strategies based on reverse engineering and additive manufacturing techniques have been proposed and proved to be a valid alternative for producing custom orthoses. Encouraged by the aforementioned results, the authors have developed a low-cost system (called Oplà), specifically dedicated to the hand-wrist-arm district of paediatric patients and capable of creating a 3D CAD model of the orthosis ready to be printed by using additive manufacturing techniques. Such a system comprises a 3D scanner, a control software and a semi-automatic CAD procedure t...