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The treatment of particular bone fractures (i.e., wrist and arm), rheumatoid arthritis or post-surgical orthopedic rehabilitation require the prolonged immobilization of skeletal muscle system. Many problems are usually related to traditional custom-made splints and supports, such as poor aesthetics, discomfort, excessive perspiration leading to odor issues, difficulties in cleaning, etc. To overcome the above mentioned problems and to improve the patients’ compliance, in recent years the integration of Reverse Engineering (RE) and Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been proposed in the field of orthopedics and rehabilitation. Reverse engineering and additive manufacturing may be suitably integrated to develop 3D customized devices for biomedical applications. Starting from image capture and analysis techniques, it is possible to fabricate a device in a layer-by-layer fashion. Today many objects may be developed by additive manufacturing, benefiting from userfriendly computer programs and from the availability of open source 3-D printers. In the biomedical field, there are many potential applications of the reverse engineering tools and technologies. Accordingly, in the proposed research 3D additive manufactured and customized devices for biomedical applications were developed. 3D devices were fabricated by fused deposition modeling (FDM), starting from the optimization of the process and instrument parameters as well as theoretical and experimental analyses. |
