Stratasys Incorporation has recently ingeniously manipulated the original use of 3D printing in order to help a young girl make use of her arms. Four year-old, Emma Lavelle, who was born with Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita (AMC), a rare disease that significantly reduces muscle strength and movement, wore a tailor-made exoskeleton and was able to lift her own arms to feed herself sweets for the very first time in her life.
Emma’s mother first came across the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX) when attending a family conference. The WREX was created by Tariq Rahman and Whitney Sample of the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. “The existing WREX is all metal parts and is kind of big,” said Rahman, “Emma was too small for that, so it required something light and small that would attach to her body that would go with her.” That something comes in the form of a durable little custom body jacket and lightweight 3D-printed plastic appendages. The limbs sport resistance bands on the upper arms and forearms, along with hinged joints that provide a sense of flotation that assists in voluntary movement and allows Emma to move her own arms in space.
Emma was invited to try an early prototype of the WREX. As Rahman describes: “The WREX was attached to a stand and she was able to put her arms into the WREX and for the first time able to lift her hands up towards her mouth”. Emma was one of the first patients to wear the WREX. Now, about 15 of the hospital’s little patients are wearing similar lightweight vests.
Using 3D printers, through a process known as additive manufacturing, the talented creators developed the customised, lightweight prosthetics for Emma, which she calls ‘magic arms’. Thanks to its customised nature and the ease of manufacturing, 3D printing is proving to be an exciting development for paediatric prosthetics, according to design magazine Core77.
3D printing technology has touched lives worldwide - mainly because of its ability to provide people with personalised solutions that tackle tough challenges that humans are facing. 3D printing is helping to break down barriers in man’s quest to solve some of its greatest challenges in society, science and healthcare.
As Scott Crump, the chairman and CEO of Stratasys, says: “Some of our world’s greatest ideas are being 3D printed. Engineers want their technical work to connect to a greater good, and 3D printing is helping them bring their ideas to fruition to improve lives and the world around us. As more people become aware of the possibilities of 3D printing, its impact outside of traditional manufacturing and design realms will continue to grow.”
3D printing market consultancy Wohlers Associates affirms this opinion in its 2012 Wohlers Report, noting that “as applications grow, the users of technology are increasing as well. It seems that almost any problem involving three-dimensional objects can be solved faster and better with the use of additive manufacturing technology.”
Gail Buttigieg is currently placed at MITA as part of the Student Placement Programme 2012
Transforming user behaviour to new businessopportunities
A Nexus of converging forces - social, mobile, cloud and information - is building upon and transforming user behaviour while creating new business opportunities, according to Gartner, Inc.
Research over the years has identified the independent evolution of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information. As a result of consumerism and the universality of connected smart devices, people’s behaviour has caused a convergence of these forces. The Nexus is the technology-immersed environment, and that environment drives business at an accelerated rate.
Using multiple devices of their choice, people connect with one another and interact with an array of information. The availability of information, which is increasingly stored in cloud environments where it is accessible by a wide range of devices, is the connection that binds this nexus of forces, as it drives social, mobile and cloud technologies to allow anywhere, anytime access to content.
“In the Nexus of Forces, information is the context for delivering enhanced social and mobile experiences,” said Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner. “Mobile devices are a platform for effective social networking and new ways of work. Social forces link people to their work and each other in new and unexpected ways. Cloud enables delivery of information and functionality to users and systems. These forces of the Nexus are intertwined to create a user-driven ecosystem of modern computing.”
Tools will continue to improve, and access to information will grow wider and deeper. Not that long ago, people’s most complicated computing experience was at work, and computing was limited to the household. Now, in most cases, the opposite is true. The consumerisation of IT is a result of the availability of excellent devices, interfaces and applications with minimal learning curves. As a result of using these devices, people have become more sophisticated users of technology, and empowered individuals. People expect access to similar functionality across all their roles and distinguish less between work and non-work activities.
Socialisation is one of the most convincing examples of how consumerisation drives IT practices. It includes personal activities like sharing comments, links and recommendations with friends. Retailers have been quick to notice the influence of friends sharing recommendations on what to buy.
The social force creates the necessity for mobility. Accessing social networks is one of the main uses of mobile devices and social interactions have much more value when they are possible in any location. Social interactions also depend on cloud for scale and access; social networks benefit from scale, the kind of scale that is really only practical through cloud deployment. Social interactions provide a rich source of information about connections, preferences and intentions. As social networks grow, participants need better tools to manage the growing number of interactions.
For business, the opportunities and risks are high. To a retailer, the same device that leads a customer into a shop can also redirect the sale to the competition. To banks, the mobile phone is a new wallet that could, one day, make the credit card obsolete. To a sales organisation, mobile computing keeps salespeople out in the field interacting with customers. To a medical caregiver, a patient’s vitals and behaviour may be constantly monitored, which increases the effectiveness and efficiency of treatment. Every industry is affected.
Cloud computing holds these forces together. It is the mode for delivery of whatever computing resources are needed and for activities that emerge from such deliveries. Without cloud computing, social interactions wouldn’t benefit from scale, mobile access would fail to be able to connect to a wide variety of data and functions, and information would still be stuck inside internal systems. Independent mobile software vendors using cloud services have more options to access information and processes than before since the cloud allows them all to exist in the same “work space” rather than being isolated in enterprise or single-PC environments.
Social, mobile and cloud make information accessible, shareable and consumable by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Developing a discipline of innovation through information allows organisations to respond to environmental, customer, employee or product changes as they happen. It will enable companies to leap ahead of their competition. An enterprise can succeed or fail based on how it responds to trends such as social media, cloud computing or mobile.
“To take advantage of the Nexus of Forces and respond effectively, organisations must face the challenges of modernising their systems, skills and mind-sets. Organisations that ignore the Nexus of Forces will be displaced by those that can move into the opportunity space more quickly”, concluded Mr. Howard.
The Malta Independent ICT Feature
This week the Commonwealth e-Accessibility Summit will be welcoming Ministers, an array of leading executives and influential figures to tackle key issues concerning national ICT policies and the use of ICTs by people with disabilities. The summit is being held in London and the final outcome will focus on strategies which can be implemented to ensure people with disabilities can fully utilise all the opportunities which ICTs have to offer.
This week, Gartner Inc, has shed light on four established forces within the ICT world which are converging as a result of people’s behaviour towards an ever-growing connected society. As people connect with one another they encounter a vast amount of information and as tools to access this information improve, access is expected to grow wider. Cloud computing is the binding force which connects these four ICT strenghts to keep society connected at anytime.
Three dimensional printing is picking up and as time goes by we are increasingly hearing of how it is being used in different scenarios. This week we are featuring an article on how a little girl is able to Commonwealth Summit on ICT for people with disabilities
overcome her disease using 3D printed arms. Her new lightweight prosthetics has given this young girl the ability to move her arms for the very first time. 3D printing is proving to be a breakthrough in paediatric therapy.
All ICT Features are available on www.mita.gov.mt/ictfeature
Roderick Spiteri is Marketing and Communications Manager at MITA and editor of Malta Independent ICT feature
Commonwealth Summit on ICT for people with disabilities
Today and tomorrow, ICT Ministers, business executives and leading civil society figures will be meeting at the Commonwealth e-Accessibility Summit to address issues surrounding the inclusion of disability into national ICT agendas throughout Commonwealth Governments.
The two-day summit organised by the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) and the UK’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport is being held at the Institute of Directors in London.
The outcome of the Summit will be a briefing document for all Commonwealth countries on the main actions that are necessary to ensure that people with different abilities can take full advantage of the potential of ICTs to benefit their lives.
In keeping with the 2012 Commonwealth theme, “Connecting Cultures”, the Summit will draw on the experiences and strengths of the Commonwealth countries to examine six main issues:
• What are the key components of a National ICT policy framework that addresses accessibility in an equitable manner?
• What are the challenges faced by governments, private sector and civil society in incorporating accessibility agendas in their ICT policies and strategies?
• What is the role that International Organisations can play to highlight the opportunities presented by ICTs to improve accessibility?
• How to implement national ICT policies relating to accessibility more effectively and efficiently?
• What are the achievements registered so far and what more can be done?
• What lessons the members of the Commonwealth learn from each other and how to systematise that knowledge more effectively?
This Summit is the first of a series of activities the CTO will launch on e-Accessibility under its new strategic plan where ICTs for Disabled is one of the six key focus areas. Building on the CTO’s strengths in training and capacity building, international events and conferences and research, the outcomes of these activities are aimed at ensuring that people with disabilities receive a fair share of the ICT-wealth of the Commonwealth.