Economic Potential for Distributed Manufacturing of Adaptive Aids for Arthritis Patients in the U.S.

Abstract

By 2040, more than a quarter of the U.S. population will have diagnosed arthritic conditions. Adults with arthritis and other rheumatic conditions earn less than average yet have medical care expenditures that are over 12% of average household income. Adaptive aids can help arthritis patients continue to maintain independence and quality of life; however, their high costs limit accessibility for older people and the poor. One method used for consumer price reduction is distributed manufacturing with 3-D printers. In order to assess if such a method would be financially beneficial, this study evaluates the techno-economic viability of distributed manufacturing of adaptive aids for arthritis patients. Twenty freely accessible designs for 3-D printable adaptive aids were successfully fabricated on low-cost desktop 3-D printers and performed their functions adequately. The financial savings averaged >94% compared to commercially-available products. Overall, twenty adaptive aids were printed for US$20 of plastic; while on average, each adaptive aid would save over US$20. As printing a tiny subset of the adaptive aids needed by a single patient would recover the full capital and operational costs of a low-cost 3-D printer, it can be concluded that there is considerable potential for distributed manufacturing to assist arthritis patients.

Mechanical Properties and Applications of Recycled Polycarbonate Particle Material Extrusion-Based Additive Manufacturing

“…The costs of additive manufacturing (AM) (notably material extrusion 3D printing) have dropped by several orders of magnitude with the open-source development of the self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap), which replaced proprietary fused deposition modeling (FDM) with the generic fused filament fabrication (FFF) [1,2,3]. With these cost declines came the real potential for a distributed manufacturing paradigm [4,5,6]: direct production by prosumers for significant cost savings compared to purchasing mass-manufactured products [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Economic analysis and the business literature support the growth of distributed manufacturing [14,15,16,17,18,19,20] because of the exponential rise of free 3D printable digital designs [12], which range from expensive scientific instrumentation [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] to everyday consumer items [10,11,12,13].…”

Low-Cost Open Source Ultrasound-Sensing Based Navigational Support for the Visually Impaired

“…One approach recently gaining acceptance for lowering the costs of hardware-based products is the combination of open source development [41,42,43] with distributed digital manufacturing technologies [44,45]. This is clearly seen in the development of the open source self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) 3-D printer project [46,47,48], which radically reduced the cost of additive manufacturing (AM) machines [49] as well as products that can be manufactured using them [50,51,52] including scientific tools [42,53,54,55,56,57], consumer goods [58,59,60,61,62,63], and adaptive aids [64]. In general, these economic savings are greater for the higher percentage of the components able to be 3-D printed [65,66].…”

Experimental Setting for Applying Mechanical Stimuli to Study the Endothelial Response of Ex Vivo Vessels under Realistic Pathophysiological Environments

“…Most importantly, we followed the open-source hardware approach [ 25 , 26 ] consisting of placing all the technical information available to the community for free replication. This approach is useful to facilitate spreading of medical devices [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ] and scientific settings [ 25 ]. Accordingly, all the technical information required to assemble the developed experimental setting (electronic circuits, sensors, mechanical pieces and microcontroller) is freely provided as Supplementary Materials .…”