Medical Design
in 2025 I worked with a Houston hospital to design an orthopedic brace for a child with spasticity.
This is what I designed.
Spaticity is an involuntary contraction of muscles. A person with spasticity must have special a brace that keeps their muscles extended, that also allows control of the affective appendages, or else they will be unable to develop or regain the correct range of motion in the limb.
The patient was a 6-year old child with autism. Current designs for spaticity braces would have been too uncomfortable and unwieldy for him. I needed to design an alternative that was comfortable, and had a lower profile, but was still strong enough to keep the patient’s fingers extended. It also had to be printable for rapid testing.
I started with a design by a previous student, and considered how it could be streamlined. I cut back on the forearm support, which also improved elbow range, and imbedded the tension compartement into the brace to make it less bulky. The tensions cable run through the brace so they cannot be easily damaged or missaligned.
The Minion on the final design was a detail requested by the patient.
The patient also needed comfortable finger braces. The first design fit but was prone to breaking and difficult to put on. The second was intended to solve the problem by “cupping” the patients fingers, but it couldn’t hold them in the correct position. The solution was to use a 2-segment design instead of 3-segment one, which was easier to put on, but provided stronger support by resting on the patient’s knuckles instead of his joints.
Future iterations would be made out of stronger materials like High Density Plastic or steel. These renders visualize what the design would look like constructed out of such materials.