We often see people with splints at the fracture site after operation on the fractures of arms, legs, wrists or ankles caused by various accidents or severe exercises. However, conventional splints are esthetically unpleasant and bulky. Moreover, patients feel uncomfortable if the splints are not customized and suitable for them. Also, their heavy weight can impose a great burden on patients, and their poor ventilation conditions might lead to several skin diseases in hot weather, thus prolonging the recovery time.
The Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique has been widely used in many medical practices, including fabrication of orthoses, thus, providing increased satisfaction to patients and effective rehabilitation therapy. Several papers have been published on the fabrication of customized orthoses using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique. In particular, customized orthoses fabricated by FDM can provide patients with best comfort with reduced incidence of various complications due to air permeability.
Om Myong Song, a section head at the Faculty of Materials Science and Technology, has determined a reasonable structural dimension of orthopedic orthoses fabricated by FDM, using a finite element simulation based on the uniform design, the simple additive weighting method, the multiple linear regression model and the grid search optimization method.
The reasonable values for the structural dimension factors of the orthosis are shell thickness of 2.2mm, lattice thickness of 6.4mm, and number of ventilation holes of 15.
If further information is needed, you can refer to his paper “A reasonable approach to determine structural dimension of FDM fabricated orthopedic orthosis using finite element simulation and simple additive weighting method” in “Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science” (SCI).
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