Six Hands, Six Purposes: Yale’s 3D Printed Prosthetic Set

A graduate student at Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science has 3D printed a set of six custom hand prosthetics for a woman born with only one hand, at a cost of a few hundred dollars, a fraction of the $70,000 price of the last device she was fitted with. The prosthetics were designed and built by Alexia Quinn through Yale’s Personalized Medicine & Applied Engineering (PMAE) master’s program for Jillian Accetta, 26, an administrative assistant at Quinnipiac University whose right arm ends at the elbow.

Rather than a single all-purpose device, Quinn and Accetta built a kit of lightweight, task-specific attachments, each clicking on and off a socket worn on the arm. Because they are printed rather than manufactured, they can be produced in hours instead of the six months a commerc