Design and Analysis of Hand and Wrist Support Device

Abstract

This paper presents a study to redesign the hand and wrist support device with improved ergonomics and comfort to the patient by using Reverse Engineering (RE) methods And Additive Manufacturing (AM) process. An initial survey was conducted through a questionnaire for early response on hand and wrist support device. CAD software to facilitate data and redesign the hand and wrist support device was used. For the scanning process, a digitiser was used to obtain the hand shapes using fake statue and hand shape made ​​of wax. Then the CAD model of the hand and wrist support device was build with the Fused Deposition Modeling machine to produce the prototype. The results of the simulation analysis indicates that the design pressure of the hand and wrist support produced with the FDM machine are safe to use based on the safety factor which is higher than 1. The study also shows that by using RE and AM, product development cycle time and manufacturing cost of hand and wrist support device can be significantly reduced.