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PROVO – Inside Brigham Young University’s engineering building, months of designing, testing, and problem-solving all come down to one moment. This year's moment was April 5, when students gathered at the Prosthetic Design Competition to test their 3D-printed prosthetic leg designs live — not on a machine, but on a person. “I had my leg amputated when I was 12,” said BYU student amputee Scott Wren. “It's honestly really cool. I'm grateful that I'm in a position where I can help in this way. You know, if there's someone else I can help by, you know, testing a random 3d printable design so that they could use it in the future, I'm happy to be able to do that." BYU's 2ft Prosthetics Club hosted the competition, challenging student teams to design a below-the-knee prosthetic leg that can be 3D-printed and worn safely. For the students, there's no real certainty about how their designs will work until this moment. “You don't really know exactly how that's going to go until you test it,” said Alan Butcherite, a BYU student on the winning team. “You can do your best to run the numbers, to do the calculations for the design and see what forces it should hold, how it should act. But you never really know exactly how that's going to go until you test it.” Butcherite says live testing shows whether a design works or fails, and whether it can truly support someone's weight. Local prosthetists and professors judge the designs, offering real-world insight students can't get from a textbook. But the most critical perspective belongs to the person wearing the legs. “It was definitely less stable than I'm used to, just because, you know, in the US, we're super privileged to have a lot of carbon fiber components that I've always had,” Wren said. “So it's definitely a different feeling. But I was also impressed with, honestly, how comfortable some of them felt while I was walking on it.” Wren has lived with a prosthetic leg for more than a decade and said while these designs aren't as advanced as what's available in the U.S., they could be life-changing elsewhere. “I think it fills me with hope, and I think it can fill a lot of other people with hope,” Wren said. “Just knowing that, you know, we don't know these people that we might help in the future, but there are people who are there to help them." The competition is held in partnership with the nonprofit 2ft Prosthetics, which sends teams to developing countries every year to fit amputees with prosthetic legs. Many students involved here have traveled on those trips and seen the need firsthand. "This project was specifically looking for a 3D printing prosthetic leg that could be optimized and used for anyone,” Butcherite said. “The idea was that maybe in the future, your design could be pushed out online, and for anyone to be able to download those files, and give them a file that they can 3d print themselves." That winning design will continue to be refined, with the hope of releasing it as an open-source prosthetic — free to use anywhere in the world, allowing amputees to enter their measurements and simply print a leg. The next step for the winning group is more testing and refinement, and they hope one day the designs will be available online for anyone who needs it.
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