Creating 3D Printed Assistive Technology Through Design Shortcuts: Leveraging Digital Fabrication Services to Incorporate 3D Printing into the Physical Therapy Classroom: Leveraging Digital Fabrication Services to Incorporate 3D Printing into the Physical Therapy Classroom

Files

3517428.3544816.pdf (2.15 MB)

Links to Files

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3517428.3544816

Permanent Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3517428.3544816
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/26300

Collections

UMBC Information Systems Department
UMBC Faculty Collection
UMBC Student Collection

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0195-1628
 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1991-6062

Date

2022-10-22

Type of Work

conference papers and proceedings
Text

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Higgins, Erin et al. "Creating 3D Printed Assistive Technology Through Design Shortcuts: Leveraging Digital Fabrication Services to Incorporate 3D Printing into the Physical Therapy Classroom: Leveraging Digital Fabrication Services to Incorporate 3D Printing into the Physical Therapy Classroom." In Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 34 (22 October 2022): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517428.3544816

Rights

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

Subjects

Abstract

Digital fabrication methods have been shown to be an efective method for producing customized assistive technology (AT). However, the skills required to utilize these tools currently require a high level of technical skill. Previous research showed that integration of these skills within physical therapy training is appropriate but that the level of technical difculty required can be an issue. We worked to address these issues by introducing a group of PT students to maker concepts and having them develop custom AT for real end users with the help of makers. We present three considerations when integrating making into PT curriculum: 1) including all stakeholders, 2) developing interdisciplinary competencies for PTs and makers, and 3) leveraging academic training programs to connect makers and PT students. In this paper, we contribute to knowledge on how to facilitate the 3D printing of customized ATs for PT students by connecting them with a community organization that provides digital fabrication services and technical expertise. By connecting multiple stakeholders (i.e., PT students, digital fabricators, and AT users), we ofer an approach to overcome time and capacity constraints of PT students to utilize advanced fabrication technologies to create customized ATs through connecting them to professional makers.