Scott Summit designed 3D-printed prosthetic legs by testing different markets. His $4,000 prototype failed in developing countries, so he built a leather-and-chrome leg for a wealthy amputee named John Siciliano. When that proved too complex to manufacture, he stripped it down to basics and gave a minimalist version to soccer player Chad, whose brain rewired to use it naturally.
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So the idea worked great. We printed a leg, $4,000, and it had the feature set of a leg probably in the $60,000 to $100,000 set range. And my hope of getting this virally spread throughout the world fell apart because the rest of the world doesn't have $4,000 to spend on it. I talked to the International Red Cross and they said, yeah, $400 tops, trying to get it down to the $200 range. So I was an order of magnitude off. So all of a sudden the idea that I had of creating this very disruptive change in the prosthetic leg world didn't really happen, kind of fell apart. So I thought about it, redesigned everything, thought okay, if I'm going to create a leg that's now for the U.S. market, let's shift markets and gears, how do you make something that's just flat out beautiful, that's the thing that I want to see when I wake up in the morning, that's the sports car that I get to wear and get to show off to the world. So I set about to that. And this is what was created. This is a guy named John Siciliano, hit by a drunk driver at 18. And so again, 3D scan of his leg mirrored over, but in this case, thinking a higher dime, higher budget, so did leather, chrome, polished metal, and the idea is just to make it look good. Now he gets a couple other details. He gets to switch out the leather in the front, because if you are going to treat it a little bit like fashion, why not? The leather is going to wear out, swap it out from one time to the next. And this was looking great. His girlfriend saw him wearing this. I guess wearing is the term. There isn't even a term that's terribly good for this. His girlfriend saw him with this and she said, wow, I like that leg better than your other leg. And here he's scratching his head and he turns to me and he says, nobody's ever said that. Nobody says that to an amputee. That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. And it's like, yeah, OK, well, that means score, that was a victory. So the problem there is that I started realizing that the amount of time it takes to create this and the complexity, the pure geometric complexity to create this leg was pretty prohibitive. I narrowed my market down to probably about 5 and so the business model for all the business people here, they do the math and they realize, yeah, that's a bad business model. So I started thinking, okay, really how do I strip this down to the core, what's the essence of it? Giving it— giving something that's otherwise clumsy machinery, giving it a beauty and a grace and a form and a sensuality and a uniqueness that it wouldn't inherently have. And so I was riding around on the motorcycle— this isn't mine, I wish— but riding around on my motorcycle thinking, okay, well, motorcycles do this all the time, why don't we just strip it down to its basics, its essence here. And so I tried making something that was the lowest cost way to get the job done here. And had test pilot Chad here try it out. Now, Chad is a competitive soccer player and his challenge was that you can't play competitive soccer when your leg has been replaced by a 30mm titanium pipe because somebody is going to kick you at full speed and bust their toes and all their metacarpals. So, he was not allowed to play and on top of that, he couldn't feel the ball because you can't anticipate the trajectory of how the ball is going to ricochet off your leg when it's a 30mm titanium pipe. So scanned his sound side limb, mirrored it over and 3D printed this leg and we put it on him and watched him play soccer. And what was interesting is after a few weeks, this is not entirely expected, he said all of a sudden his brain started to recognize and remap this new leg to his body again. He had lost his leg 8 years before, he lost his leg to cancer. All of a sudden he is playing soccer, competitively again because his brain is thinking that his body is in some form back. So it's a type of— it's a way of really regaining your sense of self, your sense of physicality.
