How 3D scanning and printing is used to create custom prosthetics for football players

The three co-founders of Protect3D, when they were still university students, had the need to develop a technology that would help one of their friends, a football player, to recover from an injury, without preventing him from continuing. Thanks to this the startup arises.

Things weren’t looking good for Duke University’s top football player when he landed on his own shoulder on a play.

“It was our last year,” says Kevin Gehsmann, one of the three founders. “Our main player, Daniel Jones, who now plays for the Giants, who was a teammate of ours and a close friend, had a collarbone injury.”

With this on the table and a fairly long recovery, the three friends got down to business. Gehsmann and his colleagues Tim Skapek and Clark Bulleit had been working on an innovative project that involved using 3D scanning and printing technology to create orthoses, as well as other support devices, that could be prototyped and printed incredibly quickly.

However, this project had not yet been approved. Despite this, they 3D-scanned the player and used this data to design and print a corset that only fit him.

A couple of weeks later, during Jones’ second leg, they managed to win and he didn’t have any pain. And it is that Thanks to a really successful test, these three friends formed a company in its own right.

The objective of Protected3D was born with the aim of taking this promising technology and using it to transform the way devices are manufactured medical or protection for athletes.

“The key to our approach, and really what we’re trying to do to disrupt the industry, is that those custom solutions traditionally require a lot of manual labor. They require hand molding, plastering, things that are labor intensive and require a high level of skill.” , they comment.

“Our mission has been to not only create great custom devices, but to make the custom device manufacturing process much smoother, more efficient, more accessible, and more scalable, bringing it to all types of sports arenas.”, they end.

This is a clear example of the democratization of sports technology. Instead of a costly and lengthy process, the company’s app allows coaches to quickly scan athletes in less than a minute using a smartphone or tablet.

This information is uploaded to the cloud and sent to a team of design engineers who use the data to create custom devices for these, which are then printed and shipped.