The OPP T-Hook in Scientific American · 18 September 08 by Jonathan Kuniholm
For those of you who haven’t seen it, our efforts to improve on the well-loved features of the out-of-production Trautman Hook have been profiled in Scientific American Magazine this month. In order to avoid any possibility of confusion with the old Trautman brand, we’re going to refer to our new and improved design from here on out as the T-Hook.
Unfortunately, no one has as of yet stepped up to do something with our design to get it in production. We’d love for that to happen, but we’re still working on the design, and the business case is still not strong enough. If you’d like to be included in any possible clinical trials of the new T-Hook, please send an email to info@openprosthetics.org, and put “Want T-Hook” in the subject line. We’ll let you know if we hear that someone’s going to give it a try.
You can check out all of the projects that we have going on our wiki page, including the T-Hook page, where you can download all of the CAD and rapid prototyping files, as well as follow a link to the CAD file viewer.
If you are an amputee, prosthetist or prosthetic technician, you can let us know what you think through our three surveys. We’re calling it a census, because we’d like to hear from everyone.
Connect to others on our social net, our community for users and volunteers. We’ve applied for access to Google Friend Connect as a way to make all of this a little more seamless, but haven’t heard back yet.
As you may have gathered, we are using a collection of free and open tools to make this happen, and it’s not perfect. If you are a master programmer and looking for a challenge, we’d love for someone to help us build a fantastic Sourceforge-type project management and collaboration tool with social networking capability, as well as the next generation of collaborative open source CAD tools to drive this and other open design projects. Until then, we’ll do with what we got.
Thanks for your interest, and we’d love for you all to jump in on the wiki, use the social net to connect with each other, and get to work.
Jon Kuniholm
