205: PRINTING PROSTHETIC LIMBS FOR FREE - NEED A HAND?

You get bit by a snake, your friend lops your arm off with a machete, or you're gonna die. There's about 1.5 million people who need a prosthetic. We need a 3D designer. There is nobody doing this full-time except us, so we really need help with complex stuff. We are heading to our friends Eric and Mary's boat to interview them today. We cannot wait for you to meet them. They converted their boat here in the Rio to a 3D printing shop to offer locals with only partial arms or hands plastic prosthetics. Here we are. We have the privilege of interviewing Eric in Rio Dulce, Guatemala. Eric is a fascinating individual, just his background and what brought him here and what he is doing while he is here. I've never heard of anything like this. We are now in a boat. It's their boat and it's a factory with high-tech printing devices that are printing prosthetic arms for kids and adults who need them. Wow, man, you guys have got it going on. Connect four game. For the kids. How long does it take to make something like that? That print will take about 14 hours and then the base will take probably eight hours and then I have to make the pieces. How expensive are these machines? These two are a thousand a piece. This one's $3,500. They're all donated. I like these a whole lot better. This one is very temperamental but this one has a bigger print space that I need. Do they use a lot of power? These are each around 400 watts and when this is running flat out with two of them it's closer to a thousand. That's the plastic filament right there. Being in the tropics we actually put our plastic into dryers and not even print at our dryers. The plastic will absorb a lot of moisture if you don't and it doesn't print very well. Interesting. That's actually the name of the person whose arm is on it. Okay, that way you don't get it mixed up. Are the plastics different qualities? Different heat tolerance, different tensile strengths, different flexibilities. We print mostly in a plastic called PETG. It's related to what clear plastic bottles are made from. Is it recyclable, this plastic? Is it from recycled material? I am switching my PETG supply right now from one company to another company that is actually 100% recycled PETG because I just want to use recycled material. The PLA is not recycled. Some of these plastics don't recycle as well as others. Like this PETG I'm using is the first PETG we found that prints well. It's great for making toys but not somebody's prosthetic. We use the PETG because it takes heat better than the PLA and we did some of our first ones in PLA and these things may get set like on a car dash or outside on a table and the heat warped a few. So we went to the PETG because it can take the heat a lot better. If they're well taken care of, how long could a prosthetic last? An adult, well taken care of, years. But there's maintenance you said every few months? The springs usually go about three or four months. The kids tend to outgrow them at six months to a year so you have to replace them on a routine basis. Tell us how you got here. So we've been on boats for 35 years either as like a nomadic wooden boat shipwright. Okay. And I did yacht interiors and then for a period of time we lived on the boat and had business on shore and then we've always been involved in humanitarian relief work. A lot of times on the logistic side, helping people we do in the field. We started a 501c3 with a couple we've worked with for many years and we thought this was all going to Vanuatu to transport doctors and nurses into remote islands. And we got this far and COVID slammed the door shut and so we stayed here and that was a little over a year ago. There's all these people that are missing limbs. To get a prosthetic here can cost you two years of your pay or more. So they just, they don't get them. There's very few people that can afford them. And I knew this had been done. I knew there was designers and stuff and I found the designers and asked them about it and they explained some things to me and we bought a printer and I've never been a 3D printer but I've worked with machinery my whole life. Here we are a year later and 60 arms later and we're up to three printers still on the boat which has significant advantages. In this country power is not dependable and printers don't like power that flickers in and out. So we're on the boat where we have sine wave inverter, steady battery supply, we can charge from solar generator ashore. So we have a good power system for that. You saw that Guatemalans were missing limbs. What was the bridge to I can create the prosthetics? How do you select people? Honestly I think God slapped me upside the head and went, you look at this. I know man, marigolds stink nothing. Most of the people doing this are doing it in the first world and trying to send it here. That creates some pretty significant issues. These things have to support. These little elastic springs on here last about four months. So we supply them with springs but when they use them up they have to have another supplier. Well that's us. We can supply them. And there's no other way around that? Well they could they could buy them from a dentist they're orthodontic. But for some of these people even that's a lot of money. The velcro straps are going to wear out and these are slip-on silicone fingertips that we can replace. We've had a few fingers broken. We've had some of the cuffs broken because I explained to them it's plastic and one guy went right out and tried to hoist 40 kilos up with it and broke his whole arm. And I was like okay I'll make you another one that's not a problem but we can't pick up 40 kilos. It is truly life changing. We have one guy go from he had lost both lower forearms in a machete attack. Yeah let's talk about that. How are these arms and limbs being lost? Sometimes violence machete attacks. Okay. Which can be anything from a fight to a robbery probably followed by motorcycle accidents. Then there's birth defects. They're mostly hands but sometimes it's somebody born. We just did a 14 year old boy who was born without hands and so we were able to make two of them. We've got some really really dark video his father sent of his son feeding himself for the first time. So that to me is cool. That is life changing. Amazing. But Aaron like this guy this first guy we met who had lost both arms he made his living because there's no social safety net here begging on the street and I got him two arms made and now he weaves hammocks and sells hammocks so he has a business. We've had three welders in a month who lost arms in industrial accidents and you don't get anything for that here. You're just out of a job. So we made arms for him and he's back in the welding business. He's welding with his prosthetic. How did they find out about you? Word of mouth right now. We didn't want to get too much publicity because we didn't know if we could handle and quite frankly word of mouth has kept us fairly busy. We now have a social worker who has been bringing busloads of people and she's been like is it okay and we're like yes yes please bring a lot you know so it's going to keep expanding. The farthest we've sent one is Columbia. There was a young girl down there who didn't have but a partial hand and 15th birthday is a big deal you have a big procession and everything and her big dream was to be able to hold her bouquet with both hands and so she's got a hand now and she had tried several places down there that wouldn't do anything. We've almost sent some to Mexico but we've been able to refer them to some Mexican groups. We've done in El Salvador and I've got a few contacts now in Belize who know we're here going to keep their eyes open and so we'll see how that goes. So so far everyone who wants a prosthetic is able to get one from you? I'm not a prostheticist so I can't handle complex cases. It's got to be something simple. This is the most complex. This guy has a thumb and a pinky and so we're working on this design which allows them to have everything and keep these fingers going. This turned out to be a little small. That's on the printer right now is the new palm. I'm not a 3D designer so we really need help with complex stuff. We can handle more unusual cases. Right now we're trying to come up with the above elbow loss. We have some people working on that. We hope we come up with a solution. How long does it take to print each one of those that are sitting there? One of these I can print maybe 30 hours. It only takes a couple hours to put it together. One of these we print for maybe 38 hours and I set up the printers overnight and again just takes a few hours to put together. If a bus comes with four people, generally about 10 days and I'll have four arms for them. It's really fast. So far we aren't so busy that we get big backlogs. Do you map the person's arm? There's a series of measurements you take just a tailor's tape. Generally you're going to measure the real existing forearm and the width of their hand, the length of their hand and the length of the remnant which tells me how far to put padding on this and the diameter of the bicep so that the cuff fits that and the program does the rest. We work with a group called Team Unlimited. He actually invented this particular set because he needs one. He uses one for himself and he didn't like what the prostheticists were giving him. They were heavy and clunky. They didn't move. We did fit a guy here in the country he's been using. He called it his club for I think like 10 or 12 years and the fingers don't move. It's carved from wood and covered in fiberglass and it weighs a lot and his life's dream was he wanted one that moved. There are some cultural issues particularly out in the villages, the more remote villages. It's a new idea. Not everybody warms up to this real fast. A lot of times the person wants the prosthetic. The family is like this is really new and strange and we don't know if we like this. So they're suspicious. That's getting better but one guy he said ah you know I only had to wait 25 years to get an arm. We're like why? He goes because my wife just passed away and for 25 years she said if I got a prosthetic she'd leave me. There's a huge cultural difference sometimes from village to village with them from village to town from town to Guatemala City. It's huge. They're literally different worlds and so we're pretty much out here in the remote areas. Wish I could do legs. We don't have the design and the ability to tackle that because there are so many missing legs for motorcycle wrecks. I want to make sure that everybody knows one of the main reasons why we're doing this video is we need a 3D designer or a group of 3D designers to customize these to help more people. Are they going to be working for free? Yes. They're going to be donating. Nobody gets paid anything. This is a humanitarian thing to do and with the design background that some of you must have out there what a great way to use it to just totally transform other people's lives with your work. What are the things that you're looking for? First off everybody wants to talk bionics. Everybody wants robotics electronics. It does not work out here. They may or may not have batteries because nobody can afford them. The cost of the batteries to power a prosthetic for a week would probably feed their family and believe me that's the choice they're going to make over getting batteries. Well here's how I communicate. I send a text to the last village that has one cell phone. When that person gets the text the next time they see somebody going up the road often on a mule or motorcycle they'll pass the word to them. Then it may take one or two days to get the word back to the person who's getting it. Wow. Who then will respond and send it back down and to this person and then they'll respond to me. It's just the way it is in the remote villages out here. For instance even like with snakebite. Okay. I've done a couple of people that lost limbs to snakebite. If you're that far out and you get bit by a snake that you know is fatal you have two choices. Your friend lops your arm off with a machete or you're gonna die. Wow. That's the reality of it. So these are all body actuated. The hand is powered by moving the wrist. They have the lines are anchored here. These are adjustable and they run up through here and on the arm it is powered through the elbow and that as they bend their arm. That is so cool. And this is adjustable like this so you can make them grip like this. Well those are like tendons and ligaments. Yes these are they call them tendon lines. Okay. They come off of here go through this lever down here up here down through all of this and then underneath the bottoms to the fingertips. While it does have a little more wear and tear for us has been the most nimble. Okay. And the most simple operator. If somebody's got a better design out there I'd love to look at it. And this designer's from Waze. Yeah. He figures this design has been downloaded to use all over the world over a hundred thousand times. Not a like a new radical idea. It's just we don't see much of this in the first world because we have completely different options there. For the basic standard straightforward case it's perfect. Okay. It's the unusual hands. Like this guy his hand is so thick I couldn't even form it to it. I have other people who are missing a thumb but have all the fingers. So you're going to be providing measurements for these unusual cases where the 80-20 rule does not apply. Right. What type of training do they need? What type of software? There are actually very few dedicated prosthetic designers in the 3D world. The design itself isn't hard to figure out but it's the unusual shapes particularly when you get into birth defects. Like this guy's hand is very wide and very very thick. Right. So the standard ratios of this just didn't work to just say okay we'll take off this and this. It's not just scaling because if we just scale stuff then holes are no longer around. The above elbow design is not easy. I have nine people waiting right now on a list after we've told people we aren't doing them. There's probably a dozen more who would show up on our doorstep within days of us actually saying we could do it. Okay. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Whereas these just hang on your arm. These have to be suspended from a shoulder. The drive line obviously is no longer your elbow. It's typically tied to the back of a harness that you wear. So it's much more complicated. Yeah. You know a lot of Guatemalan men come up to about here because they're shorter. That's sure the way it is. I need something that's really light, very scalable, that's not too complex to get on and off. And the few that guys have got around here tend to be the articulated hook. A lot of people are like I just can't see myself wearing something that doesn't look like a hand. This is a little robotic looking. There are some designs out there for instance that have a rotating wrist. Okay. Which are really cool but the finger system's just they're not as nimble as like that young 14 year old man. There's a holder I make. It holds a pencil or pen or a spoon or at any rate I stuck this in his hand. I put a pencil in it and within 15 minutes he signed his name. He'd never been able to really write before. And now they're holding spoons and forks and we have different designs like these are flexibles. This goes this gets velcroed around the hand. Okay. Kind of like this. Wow this is a whole new world. You can put utensils in here and then they can grab it and they can feed themselves with it. This is a right angled one. You can put a pen or a pencil. It'll fit a standard Bic pen or pencil. This is the tip of the iceberg. We've only been at this a year and I've been so busy keeping up with people. Sure. That I haven't really been able to explore any ideas along the lines of adaptable accessories for holding for moving. Yeah. For opening jars. How does somebody contact you? I have a Facebook page. You can find me on Eric Lamore on Facebook. The name of our non-profit is Island Missions Support. We don't come in and start something new. We come in and work alongside something local. Really got to have local partnership. It's been a real blessing to work with these people. They're really dedicated to what we're doing. And you're dedicated because you have to stay here because a lot of these parts. They will wear out. And people grow out of this. The kids outgrow them. We thought we were stopping here for a few months. I don't think we're leaving. According to who there's about 1.5 million people in the world who need a prosthetic and 10% or less will get one in their lifetime. There's a lot to do. And while robotics looks really cool and it's a really cool first world feel. Those bionic limbs are just amazing. The majority of the world is never going to be able to use it. Does color mean anything on the prosthetic arms? We made them orange so we didn't lose them. These are the demos. We started out. We brought in a bunch of colors and everybody chose this color. And it's crazy because their clothing is all these beautiful colors and you know all these mixes. And you go okay so we can do it in red and blue and yellow. I like this. Okay and you know the next one would you like red you but just this. Eric I would pick this right here. You can tell from one of the things I love doing is kids for the reason that kids get bullied big time for a physical difference here. To the point some of them just completely withdraw from society, hide in the room and that's it. Drop out of school, everything. And one of the first young man we did needed a hand. His mom says I've been praying for 12 years for him to find a hand because they can't afford it. I asked him what his big dream was and he goes I want to hold a slingshot and use it. There's an ulterior motive to that because with a slingshot he can hunt small game and with small game he can help feed his family. When I met this young man he would hide his left hand behind his back and then hide that side behind his father and was very withdrawn. Well this is a year later. He's growing like unbelievable. His mom says oh yeah he's bringing in food you know he's getting small birds and we've got more meat on the table. This kid is so confident now and so sure of himself. We started out with a hand because he had just a little bit of a hand and when he outgrew that he said it's really hard and painful to use. I'd really like a full arm. So we did him a full arm which is working wonderful and his father was there with him. We said well what color do you want and he points at this roll of neon green he goes I want that and his dad is like oh you've got no no no you want beige and he goes no I want the green and I was like no problem I'd be glad to make you the green. I've done for a couple of young ladies we've done a very light blue we just tell them it's frozen blue and then oh no I gotta have the blue okay that's it if that's a frozen color we gotta you know I'm not putting anything copyrighted on it it's just it's the blue and this one girl was so cute she and her sister would do the heart by using her hand and her sister's hand and the first picture was she picks it up and she gets the fingers to move and she says I can do it myself. So that's her big thing now and then a couple of weeks later I stumbled onto a design where you can clamp a holder to a handlebar on a bicycle and then your hand velcros on that wow and it turned out well she also was dying to ride a bike so now we've equipped her and she can ride a bike it's amazing so things that we take for granted yeah stuff that we take for granted can be a huge deal. Eric do they come see you here at the boat or do you go out into the village? We usually get word through Rita's office she is connected into like the social service people and they know the people in the villages and so usually through one of these channels we find out about them then we've had people just show up and I think twice Rita has chased somebody across the parking lot when she saw him yeah and we ended up making hands for them it's it's coconut telegraph right now and now we're getting a little more exposure like on I want to be careful about too much publicity right and then I have to tell somebody well maybe three or four months for you to get your arm but that's not happening at this point it's still it's still a really good time from what I've been told there is nobody doing this full-time except us from Mexico City to Colombia there's a lot of need out there because it could never be met nobody talked about it I would love to have like a video when you present the arm for the first time to the kid and they put it on and then realize how how it just at that point it really changes their life what is it like is it like sometimes there's a lot of tears in the office okay sometimes a lot of laughter in the office and how quickly can they get the hang of it everybody's different for instance we had one patient who's in his 60s he had been dreaming of a prosthetic for like 18 years 20 years he had lost his lower arm in a machete attack and his family wasn't very keen on it and his village wasn't very keen on it and when I put it on him he just turned around started picking stuff up and he goes I've been imagining how to do this in my mind ever since I met you and I said so now that you have this what are you going to do and he goes well you know a lot of people where I live where they don't like this strange idea and he goes I'm going out every day and I'm putting it in their face and I'm going to show them how good it can be to have this and another guy who knows him goes in here that's exactly what he does and another guy has come in because of him and we fixed him up one guy is a cowboy and he actually ropes and handles cattle with just one arm he's born without the lower arm I was like well so what are you thinking about he goes should I wear this when I'm wrestling cows and I said no he goes oh okay so I just do that job the same way I've always done it yes because it won't survive because he goes oh yeah I just wrap the rope around my stump you know I was like no we can't use a plastic arm for that but he was still but this is really great because for everything else in his daily life yeah now he has two hands to pick things up you know the young boy he was signing his name literally within 15 minutes he can now write he can feed himself that's a big deal one guy said he he's just a farmer and he goes my hardest thing is planting corn because he's got a bag of seed and he needs to ram his pole into the ground and so he was holding it here and he goes you know the end of the day I'll be all black and blue and he said you know can I hold the pole with this and I said yes and if you break it you just let me know and I'll make you an even heavier one because like a few of the welders I knew they were going to push it so as a plastic we can use it as carbon fiber reinforced wow it's a little stiffer it's a little stronger costs more but if somebody needs that I'll go to that extent but for him he was like you know how well I can plant corn now and I won't hurt and be black and blue at the end of the day to me that's a really cool thing you know yeah maybe some people wouldn't think much of that but a farm wife who had got packed badly with a machete but it's a four-hour trip for her to the emergency room they said well if you could have got here in like a half an hour we just saved the arm but it's dead now because she'd lost so much blood flow she was so skeptical at the start she was like okay it's free sure and I told her you know about the springs we need to service the springs now and then and if something breaks she goes okay what's that got three can I wash dishes with it yes can I collect firewood with it yeah sure go ahead and slowly warming up this so when we delivered it I mean I love that she has this beautiful teenage daughter who had a grin from here to here she was so excited for mom and she was a little skeptical we put it on her can I use this to sweep because to sweep she had to brace it in here and it would really rub her skin and now she has to sweep the whole house while we're there and she's just excited and then she's told us about how how easy collecting firewood is for the cook fire and her daughter is just like oh this is so great mom's just having a ball with this thing you know and it's because here you just have to learn to make do that's the reality of life can be kind of hard sometimes and it's rare for somebody to come along and just go let me improve things a little bit for you here at wow well thank you so much for sharing your story eric we're just like the name of our vote we're just blown away by this whole story I mean I'm still processing what I'm hearing I just didn't even expect all this information guys if you like videos like this make sure you hit that like button make sure you subscribe to our channel and leave us some comments we want to hear from you also it is really important that you share especially this video with anybody who you think may be able to donate their time and has the skills and another thing that you can do is donate to eric's organization and eric one thing that he doesn't need is a wife or a girlfriend because he is married to just an awesome one already just at our 41st anniversary and pretty much did what i did and married over his head one thing that you can do even if you don't give any of your own time is find a friend or somebody that you network with that might have these expertise or know somebody that might have these expertise and share this video with them and get in 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