Presque Isle native Joel Tewksbury is finishing up his senior year as a bioengineering student at Duke University, after spending part of this past summer working on one of the frontiers of medicine — 3D printing.
In August, Tewksbury and a fellow Duke student travelled to Haiti to deliver a 3D-printed prosthetic arm and hand to an 11-year-old boy named Chris.
“It was really cool. As far as I know he’s doing great,” Tewksbury said Monday about Chris, one of four people receiving a 3D-printed prosthesis through the Duke chapter of the international group eNable.
The group, which Tewksbury joined as a sophomore, creates free upper-limb prostheses for people in need through open source, 3D printing. Engineers around the world share information on creating the prosthesis with 3D printing technology, where items are manufactured from a digital computer model.
“We design things and then we put them online for anyone to use,” Tewksbury said.
Tewksbury and his fellow students found locals in the Durham, North Carolina, area who could benefit from a prosthetic limb but could not afford them, including a baker. One of Tewksbury’s fellow Duke students, Emily Shannon, also found Chris during a service trip with her church to Haiti.
“An upper-end prosthetic arm costs around $100,000 without insurance,” Tewksbury said.
“These aren’t replacements for high-end because they’re made with plastic,” he said of the 3D-printed prosthetics. “But they’re really good transitional devices and good for niche-tasks like folding laundry.”
Tewksbury said the process of creating the prostheses for the Haitian youngster was challenging but worthwhile.
“We started from mostly scratch. We designed a socket using measurements. The hand design was from an open source. We used that and modified it. We wanted to give him some functionality for his hand.”
Two of the students in the group travelled to Haiti earlier this year to test the arm and hand, which turned out to be smaller than was needed. The device came back, was enlarged, and then brought back to Chris in August by Tewksbury and Shannon.
“It was a lot of trial and error, test and adjust,” Tewksbury said. “We hope to take a trip down in another year or two, since he’ll grow out of it.”
Tewksbury said he’s happy with his experience learning about 3D printing and prosthetics while helping people. But he said he’s looking to work in different areas of bioengineering in graduate school and beyond.
“I don’t think prosthetics is where my career is headed. I think I’ll go into more bio-molecular areas like gene therapies and pharmaceuticals.”
