I spent my last two years of high school hanging around a Google+ community which crowdsourced the design and production of 3D printed prosthetic hands and arms. The original e-NABLE community (now defunct along with Google+) was
just a Google+ community with no formal structure or institutional support.
I happened to be the most active member in the SF bay area and also a marketable high school student, so I was invited to various conferences and corporate summits to speak about our community and the promise of distributed manufacturing. At one of those events I ended my talk with "I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in this room without a legal team, and we have no idea if any of this is legal so, can I borrow one?" and
Jeff Mango then a VP at Verizon generously lent us their outside counsel to establish
LimbForge.
After High School I spent my Summer in
Dr Jordan Miller's Advanced Manufacturing Research Institute designing new prostheses around the concept of under-actuation. At the time all of our devices harnessed a single motion on the wearer's body to pull a cable which actuated a single degree of freedom in the hand. I designed the first tension-distributing system to allow all the fingers to move independently, and others improved my idea into the Whipple Tree system still used in most
e-NABLE prostheses. I also built a hand which closely mimicked the skeletal structure of human hands using plastic 'bones', string 'tendons' and rubber/string 'ligaments.' That didn't work - I was still a kid - but IRIM Lab Koreatech's more recent
FLEXX hand is
exactly what I was going for.