EMS@C-LEVEL
As Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and SCOOP writer, Philip Stoten, continues to talk to EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Services) executives he learns more about their individual and collective experiences and their expectations for their own businesses and for the entire electronic manufacturing industry.
EMS@C-LEVEL
TECH4GOOD SPECIAL: 3D-Printed Prosthetics and Hearing Aid Projects for Children in War-Torn Regions
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What if cutting-edge technology could revolutionize the lives of children in need, especially those in refugee camps or war-torn environments? Join 3DP4ME.org founder, Jason Szolomayer and I for a captivating conversation uncovering the incredible strides made in their first hearing project, supporting 52 children with customer hearing aids as well as with home visits and essential ongoing support.
Thanks to a generous three-year funding commitment from His Royal Highness Prince Mired Bin Raad, President, Higher Council of Affairs of Persons with Disabilities (HCD) in Jordan, as well as other donations, the project continues to thrive despite the ongoing challenges of securing additional institutional donors.
But the story doesn't end there—Jason also introduces us to their pioneering work into 3D-printed prosthetics, inspired by the need for these solutions in the war-torn region of Gaza, with a promising pilot project in Jordan.
In our second segment, Jason unpacks the comprehensive approach necessary for delivering customized prosthetics, from physiotherapy to psychological support and family involvement. Collaborations with other NGOs, corporates, and tech juggernauts like Intel and Accenture are crucial, showcasing the importance of strategic alliances and timely tech transfers.
Learn about the inspiring efforts in Gaza and Ukraine and discover an innovative online modular speech therapy program designed to break down logistical barriers for families.
This episode shines a light on the transformative power of technology and the essential role of collaboration in tackling real-world challenges, not to mention the amazing work done and sacrifice made by exceptional people like Jason.
Learn more at https://www.3DP4ME.org or donate at https://3dp4me.org/step-by-step-gaza/
Filament Innovations - https://www.filamentinnovations.com/
Bionic P&O - https://www.bionicpo.com/
His Royal Highness Prince Mired Bin Raad, President, Higher Council of Affairs of Persons with Disabilities (HCD) in Jordan - https://www.hcd.gov.jo/Default/En
DHL - https://www.dhl.com/global-en/home.html
Ottobock - https://www.ottobock.com/en-ex/home - Mafaz Medical, Ottobock - Jordan distributor - https://mafazmedical.com/
EMS@C-Level is hosted by global inspection leaders Koh Young (https://www.kohyoung.com) and Global Electronics Association (https://www.electronics.org)
You can see video versions of all of the EMS@C-Level pods on our YouTube playlist.
Hello, I'm Philip Stoughton, from my Home to Yours. Welcome to EMS at Sea Level. I am with Jason from 3D Print. For Me, jason, we chat reasonably regularly, but not as often on camera as we'd like to perhaps regularly, but not as often on camera as we'd like to perhaps Give me an update on where we are, firstly with the hearing project, and then I want to touch on the exciting new stuff you're doing with prosthetics.
Speaker 2Yeah, thanks, phil. You know it's always a joy to be with you and I think right now, you know we're focused on not only maintaining the 52 kids we helped last year, focused on not only maintaining the 52 kids we helped last year, which has been just, I think, so inspiring. You know, you meet these kids where before they had limitations, and especially in school settings, and now you just see them. We do the home visits where we provide new batteries, we check up on them, and their parents are so excited to see their kids thriving at school and having more capability to go to local store, and so that's inspiring. We did get a very, very generous gift from His Royal Highness Prince Meded's team at the Higher Council here in Jordan, and they gave us a three-year runway, which we're super grateful for, and the first year is advocacy, where we're trying to raise the banner for what we're doing, and in the next two years they're going to help us provide a number of kids with hearing aids.
Speaker 2So that's a great breakthrough, but I think to be quite frank is we've had a hard time finding institutional donors on the hearing side and I think we're not giving up. I was in Aspen a month or two ago and having some great conversations, so I think hopefully we can find people who want to see lives transformed with the gift of hearing.
Speaker 1Yeah, and you've got a pilot study. You can show how it's worked. You have the process down, you know what the costs are, you know what the return is and you know when you think about it as ROI return on investment. It's sensational, isn't it? If you can give a, you know, if you can give a child the gift of hearing and everything that comes with that education opportunity, it's something quite amazing. So congratulations on that and, you know, do keep going on that. But I think, in the environment we're in, and with what's been going on in Gaza and stuff, it's really interesting to hear this story about how you're now using 3D printing in a new arena, which is the arena of prosthetics.
Speaker 1Tell me a bit about how that came about.
Speaker 2We're in humble beginnings here, so I think we have to stay in that position of about how that came about. We're in humble beginnings here, so I think we have to stay in that position of a learner, just like we did in the hearing space, where this is something where we're learning from others. So we had been. We had been looking at 3d technology for lower limb, especially below the knee, talking to a number of experts and trying to identify what was the best material and the 3D printer and the process. But I think, because of you know what's transpiring in Gaza and the need that we see there, you know that's quite immense and really tugs on your heart. You know, I think we really accelerated our desire to see this come to life, and so we've taken steps to really say, okay, how do we get this in place? To do a pilot in Jordan.
Speaker 1Hmm, okay, and what's the timeline? On that, I know you've already had some really good responses in terms of donations and commitments and some funding. Lots more to do provide prosthetics as an NGO, which is amazing.
Speaker 2And we got Filament Innovations to donate a massive printer that they use, and DHL graciously sponsored the shipment of the 400-pound printer to Jordan and the Jordanian government gave us the customs exemption.
Speaker 2But I think the key component of this is the knowledge sharing, and we're so grateful for the team at Bionic P&O. They're a US-based company who run 50 clinics in 15 states and they've been doing this for a number of years successfully in the US market, and when we looked at the landscape of who we could partner with, you know, we just felt like they were the best fit for us. And so they're. They're going to come to Jordan, like Dr Brian did for our pilot on hearing, and they're going to come and doa pilot for five children, and so so we're, we're excited about that, and but we're right now we're working on all the logistics to kind of bring that to life. And you mentioned you mentioned the financial portion. We've got a number of commitments, even a commitment recently, but I think right now it's just trying to figure out how do we get our house in order to really pull this off as soon as possible.
Speaker 2And in terms of shipping and logistics. Hiring some new staff.
Speaker 1Yeah, in terms of technical support, in terms of technology, what do you think you need? If people are watching, they're in the additive manufacturing industry, they have a skill set. What kind of skills do you need, on a volunteer basis, to support what you're doing?
Speaker 2Great idea. I mean in terms of just putting the word out there, I think. I think we built a custom software on Amazon that that we leveraged for the hearing side One of our yeah, one of our volunteers, matthew.
Speaker 2He's building that out. But we could really use some help on the development side. That you know we're about 90% complete on that. So if there's some development help, I mean the foundation is there. You know we're about 90% complete on that. So if there's some development help, I mean the foundation is there, the framework, but we do need a little bit of help there. In terms of the additive side, I think where we could see demand is on the customization. If somebody's in the prosthetic space and they know how to customize those sockets, I think that's going to be critical because what we're going to do is and we're just copy pasting off of the team at Bionics experience. But you know we're going to print the socket and we're going to partner with Autobach, the, the, the provider of the components, and we've already worked through what we need from them.
Speaker 2And that's about it's 550 JDs, which I believe, if I do my's jordanian dinars.
Speaker 2If I do my numbers, I think it's about 750 dollars, and then we're going to focus on the component parts, uh, that fit to our uh specialized socket, you know, and in the socket we would do the socket itself and then a foam liner. Um, right, and so think, for us it's just knowledge transfer from the bionic. But you know, let's say somebody wanted to come for a period of time to Jordan and they were committed to helping us add the capacity. I would be open to a conversation on that.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, I think that would be exciting, wouldn't it? And you know it's continuous fundraising cycle for both projects. We've got to reach out and get companies interested in that, and we'll make sure we put links in the show notes to the people that have provided you with equipment and stuff. But also, where they can, where they can reach out to you and either donate their time or donate cash so you can you can continue what you're doing. These things do take a lot of funding, and the economy this year has been not great for the manufacturing industry. Has that made a difference? Is it one of those things that people kind of push back a little bit on when times are tough?
Building a Holistic Prosthetics Ecosystem
Speaker 2I feel like people are generous. I'm just going to say that, and I think they have been generous over the years. We're a small NGO, so we're not a World Vision or a larger NGO. We're emerging, but people have been very generous to us to really focus in on Gaza and trying to figure out a solution that could work. I think we want to test it first, but also it can't just be the prosthetic. I think this is key to emphasize. You have to look holistically, you know, because it's physiotherapy afterwards, it's the psychologist who works with the child and their family and it's a long-term journey. So it's not just that, hey, it's a transaction, we give you a prosthetic. It's no work compared to the journey with this family.
Speaker 1Yeah, and that's where you need to think about the costs and that's where it escalates a bit. I think what's interesting you look at that as an ecosystem of provision that you're doing for those people, but also thinking of an ecosystem of using technology to do this. You know, you've seen the first application for 3D printing that you recognised, which was the custom hearing aids. Now you're in the custom prosthetics. It's something that I feel that the industry has talked about for a long time, but we haven't really seen as much rubber hit the road as perhaps we'd like to on these stories. Is it still something that's top of the agenda at the large corporates?
Speaker 2You know, I think what we found with Intel and Accenture and BASF in the past is I think they're keen to get involved.
Speaker 2It just has to fit the timing for them. I think timing is a big importance, but I'm certain that we can find potential new partners who really like DHL. I mean, dhl is a great point in case, but I think for us we're not the only player, like one of our hearts is trying to convene. So what we understand about GAWS is there's about 10 to 12 NGOs focused on this and we did an event in early June. We brought a number of them together to have a panel discussion and hopefully we're going to do another event in September here in Jordan, where I'm based and just trying to bring people together. So we're not working in silos, we're having open dialogue to say you know how do we do this together because the need is so great. I think they mentioned, you know, in our panel discussion it was over 8,000 at time in june that need people in gaza, that need a prosthetic and that's a. That's a big cohort of people need. So not one organization can tackle that so our heart.
Speaker 2our heart is like how do we get people in the same room to have a conversation like yesterday? I talked to red cross, red crescent here and they had mentioned they're just starting up again in Gaza City. They have Crossitis and that's inspiring for me.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2And so it's just trying to encourage people and try to figure out how do we add more capacity and thought strategically.
Speaker 1Yeah, and it's absolutely not about ego, is it? You know, if you've got spare time on your machine, then use that machine for anybody that can. You know that can do the work. What I really like about 3D print for me, though, is because it is a smaller NGO. You know that any contribution you're going to be making, it's going to really have a direct impact on the projects. It's not like there's a big overhead. It's not a large, complex organization. It's very much focused on delivering those solutions where they're needed, so I think that makes a huge difference.
Speaker 2No, you're spot on, and I think key for us is collaboration and tech transfer, because you have these companies like Bionic, who've really mastered it and they're still humble in their journey. But if we can learn from them and just copy paste, we have to be environment sensitive, you know just, you can't make assumptions, but I think you have to test those assumptions in a pilot and then iterate in a pilot and then iterate. And so I think for us it's hiring the right people the doctor, the prosthetist, the 3D technician and a project manager and then they become a core team in Jordan that can train teams in Gaza. You know, we're taking an iPhone, we're scanning the residual limb and that picture then goes to the cloud and then it comes back to our production site where we print out that socket and send in the components as a kit. It's similar to what a number of folks are doing in the Ukraine right now. So I think we're not recreating the wheel, but just trying to figure out what's relevant to this environment.
Speaker 1Yeah, and what's the best solution and what works, what works for your organization and what works for the uh, the people that actually have the issues and need that, need that challenge resolved. I love what you're doing. I love the whole um aspects of technology being used in this way. You know, I think sometimes we we just think about the commercialization of technology and we don't think enough about the real world problems that can be, can be solved. And if we can, uh, you know, if we can perhaps do both of those together as innovators, we'll all, we'll all uh sleep a lot better, as well as uh, as well as succeed yeah, no one story that's been really encouraging for for this year was we wanted to get kids into speech therapy.
Speaker 2You know we give them a hearing aid but you know, for instance, if a mom has five kids, you know it's hard for her to bring one child on a consistent basis to a center where they can get speech therapy.
Speaker 2So we had a lady her name is Yara and and with the team at Deaf Kids Code in the US and the lady named Serene who runs that her son had speech delay at age six and she went through this modular speech therapy kind of journey with her son, and now her son's in college is a physics major and she said there's no reason why we couldn't do an online modular in Arabic. So we're still in infancy on this, but Yara, this amazing lady who's a specialist in this type of speech therapy, we recruited four other speech therapists from the Middle East and we're trying to build out our first modular, maybe next year, in 2025, and just make it open source, you know, so people can have a digital experience, you know, and just think about these issues and figure out solutions that are real world, you know, and they can actually apply.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, and it's great, isn't it, when people are like, yeah, we use this for our own, for our own situation. It worked. How can we adapt it? How can we scale it? And how can we adapt it? How can we scale it and how can we make it available to those that actually need it? So, um yeah, brilliant stuff. Jason, we'll add as much as we can in the show notes so people can, uh, can, get hold of you and can follow you on the various social media, because you, you put out a lot of material and I think it's in important that people keep abreast of that. But in the meantime, thanks for chatting today and I look forward to talking again soon. Thank you.
Speaker 2Thanks, phil, have a great day.