I’m back with more Creo goodies you may have missed at PlanePTC Live in Orlando last month. This year’s event was especially exciting because of the passionate customer presentations. One such speaker was Mike Leydet, Design Engineer and Director of Research at College Park Industries.

Leydet presented “Inspiration and Passion behind World’s Most Anatomically-Correct Prosthetic Foot”. A full recording of the presentation is available for viewing.

College Park Industries uses Creo to develop prosthetic feet, which helps people who have had limb amputations live fuller lives.  He began his presentation with some surprising stats.  Currently, there are 1.7 million Americans living with limb loss, and around 100,000 additional amputations are conducted each year. He went on to describe that there are many difficulties when designing prosthetic feet.  Every individual has a different shoe size, and College Park must be aware of the different foot sizes, and then shoes available for sale.  Leydet showcased his prosthetic feet through stories of different individuals who use his company’s products.  Some stories included a man with a high school injury, a small boy without fibulas, and a woman who was involved in a cannon explosion.  These stories showed the happiness the prosthetic foot brings to each person, and the difference it has had on their lives.

Lastly, Leydet invited Michael St. Onge, a man who has lost all four limbs, to the stage to talk about his experience.  St. Onge showed the audience how he puts on the prosthetic legs and is able to function nearly the same as a person with leg limbs.

While at PlanetPTC Live, Leydet was also interviewed by Josh Mings (SolidSmack) and Adam O’Hern (cadjunkie) on their podcast Engineer vs. Designer.

Check out their interview with Leydet as they discuss:

• Presenting at PlanetPTC as a source of inspiration
• Designing specific solutions for specific individuals
• How he got into designing and engineering prosthetics
• Kids and engineering

A company that makes artificial limbs can tell emotionally moving stories like no other. Of course, most of us don’t need assistive aids. Plus, we have business to attend to as we make commercial machinery, electrical components, widgets, etc. As such, you might be tempted to scroll past a story about a company in a whole different industry.

But I would argue that PTC Creo customer College Park Industries is worth a closer look, no matter your line of business.

College Park is a prosthetics company that is growing its market share, entering new markets, improving profit margins, and sweeping the competition—and it’s not all done with heartwarming human-interest stories. It’s done with smart engineering and business ideas that any of us could learn from.

Meet Customer Needs.

College Park’s flagship (and first) prosthetic is the Trustep, an artificial foot launched in 1991. Today, the company offers many different styles of foot prosthetics. The product range addresses the needs of younger and older people, larger and smaller foot sizes, and average and athletic lifestyles. The company expands its line every year, and as a result is growing its market share.

Find Neglected Markets.

College Park has 10 different product lines. In just the past few years alone, the company added the Soleus, Velocity, and Celsus. Many of these products are specialized for unique lifestyle choices. Snowboarding? Rock climbing? Afternoon gardening? College Park has a solution for them all. And that’s been key in helping the company break into new markets and find new customers.

In addition, the company is expanding geographically with  projects to bring quality prosthetics to people in countries with little healthcare support.

It takes vision and courage to venture into new markets. Fortunately, College Park, like its customers, has plenty of both of those traits.

Use Technology Intelligently to Improve Profit Margins.

One way that College Park succeeds in reaching new markets is by keeping quality high and costs reasonable. The company does this in two ways:

• Engineers constantly evaluate new and improved materials and manufacturing processes to make sure they’re making the best products for the lowest costs.
• The company effectively leverages individual components in such a way that it can offer hundreds of thousands of variants. For example, the Trustep product is customized using fewer than 5,000 components, for a total of 460,000 options. This reduces inventory, lowers product costs, and allows for more exhaustive testing of all components.

Patent Your Work.

Here’s a no-brainer: College Park designs are patented, and so they’re not likely to be replicated by competition.

Why Should You Care About Prosthetics?

College Park Industries is a leader in a unique market, and it’s likely to stay that way.  But it’s interesting to note that the company got there the same way most of us do:

• Meeting customers needs
• Expanding into new markets
• Keeping up with materials, processes, and costs
• Protecting intellectual property

We’re eager to tell you about our customers like College Park and their successes because we all learn from each other regardless of our industry. Keep watching this space for more stories from PTC Creo customers and how they grow their businesses.

“After becoming an amputee in 2001 due to a hang gliding accident, Scott Sulprizio, a designer and business owner, began tinkering with his own prosthetic foot. His interest in obtaining the best function from the feet available to him turned into a passion to design and build his own. After much iteration, Sulprizio successfully designed and patented a novel foot concept in 2005 that contained a new, dynamic propulsion ability. Months later, College Park purchased the technology from Sulprizio and began the intense design work to take it from a prototype to a production-ready product for sale.

College Park spent two years further developing the design to maintain the superior functional characteristics of the original design, while incorporating the durability necessary to achieve the 2 million cycle testing required to pass ISO requirements. The end result was the Soleus foot, named after the Soleus muscle in the lower calf, and introduced to the market in 2009.

One way that College Park fosters such design breakthroughs is its use of a nontraditional approach to concept design. Anyone, not just the engineering department, can propose ideas. The company uses CAD design software from PTC to help enable easy, innovative design. Specifically, PTC Creo enables College Park to take any new concept to the market quickly. The company can take ideas or sketches, create 3D models within days, review the industrial design aspects, tweak them, and then prototype it all within PTC Creo.”

Read the full article.

The human hand is a complicated piece of work. Fingers bend in three spots, they work with the thumb to pinch and grasp, or they can ball up together to make a fist. To make a replacement as sophisticated, you’d not only have to create a machine with a outstanding flexibility, but you’d also have to devise a feedback mechanism so that it could pick up delicate objects without breaking them, and at the same time provide the strength to open a stubborn jar.

That’s the work the team at Vincent Systems pursues. Since 2009, engineers at this German company have explored ways to put all this capability into a package that weighs as little as 250 grams and takes up no more space than, well, no bigger than your hand. Here’s how they build their bionic marvel.

The Vincent Partial hand system enables the anatomically and biomechanically correct restoration of the active gripping and holding function.

To get the scale exactly right, they scan the opposing hand. The digital version is brought into PTC Creo and then mirrored to create the external dimensions of the new hand. CEO Dr. Stefan Schulz says his team (which works with PTC partner, INNEO) has used this method to create hands for patients as young as 5 years old. In fact, he says his company is the first to ever offer a bionic hand for children.

Inside the hand, the engineering team then models a set of up to six motors—one for each finger and two for the thumb. The motors then drive a proprietary gear system as small as 10 mm in diameter and capable of 2 Nm torque.

The VINCENT evolution 2 is a compact and biomechanically optimized high-strength aluminium alloy hand combining 10 bi-directionally motor driven axes.

The result is a device that can produce dozens of grasp patterns—for example, a three-point close, in which the first two fingers meet the thumb, or a simple hitchhiking/thumbs up gesture.

To get the strength engineers want, without adding too much weight, they build the bionic hand using carbon fiber and polyurethane, sheathing it in rubber and plastic to give it a soft human feel. An additional motor provides feedback to the wearer, vibrating to indicate how much force is being used.

Listen to Dr Stefan Schulz, CEO of Vincent Systems introduce the company and his vision.

(Note. The video is in German, but closed captioning with translation is available. At the bottom of the video window, click the Caption button [CC]. Click the pull-down arrow, select Translate Captions, and select English. Then click On.)

Throughout the design process, engineers use PTC Creo for design, analysis, and simulation, ensuring that the model works as planned, well before physical prototyping and production.

Vincent designers use PTC Creo for design, analysis, and simulation of prosthetic hands

Tens of thousands of people in the United States live without hands and fingers today, some due to injury, others due to illness or congenital conditions. And while prosthetics have been available for a very long time, the Vincent designs bring more than the others. Not only are they highly functional—they’re attractive.

“We win a lot of design awards with the hand,” says Schulz. “For the patient, it’s a nice feeling to have a designed hand, it’s not an old prosthesis. It’s a high-level design the wearer wants to show other people.”

This year, the team won the Silver Design Award for Industrial Design in Germany, and in 2013, the Innovation Prize from the CyberChampions Awards.

In a recent webinar, hosted by Tech Briefs Media Group, Schulz talked about his company’s ground-breaking technology and how PTC Creo and KeyShot both play key roles in the development of Vincent products as well as the awards the company receives for them. You can listen to the recorded webinar here to find out more about this remarkable company and technology.

Ed – Companies like Vincent Systems and College Park Industries help people overcome challenges. Many, like Reggie Showers, two-time motorcycle drag-racing champion, and Haley Higdon, are walking proof that people who believe in themselves can overcome even the toughest challenges.

Images courtesy of Vincent Systems.

“Although crude prosthetic hands have been available for many years, in recent decades, technological advances have made possible artificial hands that offer an ever-wider range of grips and movements. The newest versions, sometimes called bionic hands, use sophisticated electronics and software in an attempt to more closely mimic a wider range of the hand’s natural capabilities.

But until recently, all commercially available prosthetic hands have fallen far short in their ability to replicate the full measure of what the human hand offers. Achieving those characteristics is the goal of VINCENT Systems GmbH of Karlsruhe, Germany, which develops ultra-sophisticated prosthetic hands designed using HP Z420 workstations and PTC Creo 3D CAD software, supported by INNEO Solutions, an HP Gold Partner and PTC Platinum Partner.”

Read the full article here. [Registration Required]