Automatic CAD Modeling of Ventilation Holes for 3D Printed Wrist Orthoses

The present paper presents the study of a semi-automatic CAD technique for the generation of ventilation holes on ABS AM-manufactured arm orthoses. A lighter device, good air and water transpiration and an increased patient’s comfort are the main advantages achievable by introducing openings on plastic casts. The proposed procedure relies on the adaptation of a reference pattern of holes, obtained integrating both structural and functional aspects, to each patient’s cast. The adaptation procedure maps the original pattern, respecting its proportions, on each target orthosis, thanks to a set of reference points automatically extracted. The actual generation of holes is performed relying on an advanced CAD environment (i.e. Siemens NX), where a series of CAD modeling operations, based on the data extracted by the mapping algorithm, have been studied and tested. The whole procedure has been tested on 5 orthoses to validate its efficacy.