milwaukee magazine

Our work with Shea, Karuna, Hayley, and Evan was included in the Health issue of Milwaukee Magazine.

karuna's swimfin

Teresa asked me if I might be able to make a new swimfin for Karuna. He has outgrown his old swimfin so I borrowed his old one so I could take a look at what he has been using. I modeled this the other day while I was cutting parts for the new Chancellor's medallion. I printed this prototype to see if this might work as a 3D printed alternative to what he had. I need to make a few adjustments, but it's pretty close for a first try and a quick turnaround.

karuna's trumpet adaptive device

As a part of the 2015 Summer Fellowship Pilot Program of the Enable Community Foundation, Digital Fabrication and Design Graduate Candidate, Caitlin Driver, conducted research at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Digital Craft Research Lab into 3D-Printed adaptive devices. Driver designed an adaptive device that enables 10-year Karuna Levie to hold and play a trumpet. Karuna was born without fingers on his left hand. The prototype device was designed for Karuna’s Bach model TR300 trumpet. The design files for the trumpet adaptive device are available to anyone for download and 3D printing as a result of Driver’s research. Through the Enable Community’s online Google+ community, the boy’s mother, Teresa Levie, was connected with University of Wisconsin Milwaukee professor, Frankie Flood, who served as Driver’s advisor on this project. Driver’s research was conducted at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Digital Craft Research Lab at the Peck School of the Arts where professor Flood conducts research.

The research conducted by Driver was funded in part from a $600,000 Google.org grant, Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities, awarded to the Enable Community Foundation to further advance the Enable community's innovative work on 3D-printed open-source prosthetics and adaptive devices.

More details about this project, including photos, can be found at Driver’s blog, http://digitalfabricationanddesign.com and the 3D files for the Adaptive Trumpet Device can be downloaded at the following 3D file sharing sites:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:966165 or

https://www.youmagine.com/designs/trumpet-adaptive-device

About the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Digital Craft Research Lab:

The Digital Craft Research Lab’s goal is to foster innovative, creative research in the areas of design, craft, and art by combining advanced digital technology with traditional craft practice in an effort to educate students for the future. The DCRL fosters interdisciplinary design research, material research, and innovation through making. It is envisioned as a facilitator for partnerships between UWM researchers and regional businesses, nonprofits, arts organizations, other universities and schools.

About Enable and the Enable Community Foundation: 

The e-NABLE community is an open community founded by Jon Schull in 2013 to crowd-source the design, fabrication, and dissemination of 3D-printed prosthetics for children and others missing fingers or hands. The volunteer community has grown continuously since then, and has already delivered hundreds of devices to recipients in at least 37 countries. The Enable Community Foundation was founded in October 2014 to support the mission and operations of the e-NABLE community. The community's public-facing website is http://enablingthefuture.org. Their nexus for collaboration is a Google plus community with thousands of members, at http://bitly.com/e-nable. More information about obtaining a device, volunteering, partnering, donating, or sponsoring can be obtained by emailing info@enablingthefuture.org.

karuna's dovetail trumpet holder

Caitlin's Enable Fellowship is wrapping up. She has been working on a trumpet holder for Karuna. She has done an amazing job with this project. 

The piece that fits on the trumpet fits so nicely. To secure the piece, it's just a matter of snapping the large plate onto the valve and then sliding a bottom piece on that locks it to the trumpet. She then designed a hand and gauntlet that have a multi-postion dovetail disc that interfaces with the trumpet dovetail. We will be able to make other attachments that interface with this dovetail. 

Karuna wants a swim fin for the dovetail hand in addition to the trumpet device. The nice thing about the trumpet component is that Karuna can leave the trumpet dovetail attached to the trumpet even while the trumpet is in his trumpet case. He is able to put on the new hand and gauntlet and then he pull out his trumpet and simply slide the trumpet onto his hand. I hope to redesign Shea's bow holder so she doesn't always have to have the bow and arm piece permanently attached to each other. It should cut down on her running it into things or it sticking out of a bag in an awkward way. 

We did a test fitting two weeks ago and it seems to work really well. Caitlin has strengthened some of the hinge pivots and she should be able to release the files on the DCRL Thingiverse page soon.

cbs full video

CBS published  the full video about Karuna and his trumpet holder. It can be viewed here.

karuna on cbs 58

CBS News 58 visited the DCRL a few weeks ago. Karuna and Teresa were visiting so we could look at the first trumpet holder that we had crudely put together for him to use this year in band and also we could test fit one of the recent prints to his trumpet. It was a good opportunity for me to be able to see Karuna use the first prototype and play for us so I could see his arm positioning. I asked Kaivahn to come in since he has been working on the trumpet adapter with me. Reporter Priscilla Luong had contacted me long ago to see if she could do a story on 3D printing as Matt Mabee had sent the station our way after they had visited his lab in Architecture. We finally secured a date and it worked out for all of us to meet.

Karuna is getting so big and I love how he is starting to become less shy. I also enjoyed seeing seeing Karuna move our models around in Rhino and it was great to see how quickly he learned the navigation system; I think we might have a future computer modeler in our midst. We had a great time talking with each other and discussing how we first connected last year. The day we filmed was actually fairly close to it being a year that Teresa and I had first connected. At the time I thought I was talking to someone halfway across the country. We didn't know it at the time, as we were speaking via a Google HangOut, but we live within a 25 mile radius of each other. Once we figured this out we decided to meet up and the rest is history. Even though this semester was filled with so many things that I had happening, it was nice to slow down that day and just spend time talking with Karuna and Teresa.

The CBS story will air tonight.