Optimizing Prosthetic Socket with Additive Manufactured Structure

A prosthetic socket, as one of the critical components of a prosthesis, is responsible for holding the amputee’s residual limb and supporting the patient’s body weight. It is crucial to improve patients’ user experience and quality of life by reducing the sockets’ weight while maintaining strength and flexibility. As a result, additive manufacturing (AM), which can fabricate customized complex structures, is an ideal manufacturing process for the socket. Among the AM printers, Fuse 1 (Formlabs, Boston, MA), using Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technology and nylon 12 powder, is applied to the production. In addition, replacing solid structures with lattice ones will provide the socket with a high stiffness-to-weight ratio. In order to develop an optimized structure, the lattices are printed and redesigned for several iterations. Additionally, 3-point bending tests are implemented to evaluate the strain and stiffness of the structure. Furthermore, statistical methods are utilized to analyze the data.