The Berkeley Prosthetics Project (BPP) is a volunteer team that designs prosthetics for people in need of a customized solution. Under the leadership of BEST Labber Daniel Lim (photo below left), the team uses the prototyping facilities of the  CITRIS Invention lab, such as 3D printers, scanning devices, and laser cutters to build customized prosthetics. The team is currently designing a prosthetic hand (photo below right) for a young girl named Sophie.

Daniel Lim is a UX design freelancer in the Silicon Valley specialized in prototyping, industrial design and business modeling. He is also working with Alice Agogino and Euiyoung Kim to work on Internet of Things (IoT) research with Samsung Electronics and on building a tangible design roadmapping system. His MEng research was on the UX Design of a smart office. He was granted a Master’s degree from M.Eng (Master of Engineering) program at UC Berkeley in 2015 and currently working as a UX designer in the BEST Lab and Invention lab in UC Berkeley.

The project was  featured in the Fall 2015 issue of Berkeley ENGINEER  (Volume 8), College of Engineering, UC Berkeley – Sophie’s Super Hand: Fabricating custom prosthetics. See the full article and video: http://engineering.berkeley.edu/magazine/fall-2015/sophies-super-hand

The project is also being displayed at the CITRIS Tech Museum. Molds of Sophie’s hand are shown in the white models in the upper left in the featured image below, along with  some of the early prototypes for communicating and testing options. The parts are printed from ABS plastic at a cost of less than $10 to make.

 

News update:  Daniel Lim, Hyunil (Chester) Cho and Brennan Chung won second place in a 3D printing Designathon with prompt: Come up with assistive technologies using 3D printing within 24 hours. They created a universal clamp that can fit into different sizes of prosthetic legs. Photo from the event below.

The story was also carried by Channel 5 6:00 pm CBS news on Wed., Nov. 28, 2015. Stay tuned for Youtube clip.