A Customer-to-Manufacturer Design Model for Custom Compression Casts

Abstract

This paper presents a computational framework for designing and optimizing custom compression casts/braces. Different from the conventional cast/brace design, our framework generates custom casts/braces with fitness, lightweight, and good ventilation. The computational pipeline is an end-to-end solution, directly from customer to the manufacturer, which starts from a 3D scanned human model represented by mesh and ends with the 3D printed cast/brace. Our interactive tools allows users to define and edit the 3D curves on the mesh surface, and trim the mesh surface to form the cast/brace shape using the curves. These tools are efficient and simple to use, and also they enable designing the custom casts/braces fitting to the given human body. In order to reduce the weight and improve the ventilation, we adopt the topology optimization (TO) method to optimize the cast/brace design. We extend the existing three-dimensional (3D) TO method to the mesh surface by simplifying the optimization problem to a 2D problem. Therefore, the efficiency of the TO computation is improved significantly. After the optimized cast/brace design is obtained on the mesh surface, a solid model is generated by our design interface and then sent to a 3D printer for fabrication. Simulation results show that our method can better re-disturb the stresses compared with the conventional 3D TO.