>> Meredith Ringel Morris: Good morning.
>> Jon Schull: Good morning.
>> Meredith Ringel Morris: Thank you so much for coming in person and people watching online, thank
you. We’re really excited today to be able to host Dr. Jon Schull. Jon is a Research Scientist at the
Rochester Institute of Technology. He describes himself as not only a Psychologist but also an inventor
and entrepreneur. Now the President of the Enable Community Foundation as well and that’s the work
that Jon is going to talk to us about today.
The Enable Community designs, fabricates, and distributes prosthetics using 3D printing. You may have
already heard about their work. They’ve been featured in many major news outlets for the great work
they’re doing. I think it’s really exciting that we have Jon here to talk to us today and to visit with us at
Microsoft.
For those of you who are watching online there is a facility for asking questions where you’ll be able to
type them into the Resnet website. They’ll show up on a computer that I have. If I see any questions
come I’ll raise my hand and ask them for you by proxy. Great, thank you, and welcome Jon.
Oh, and also actually one last note I’d like to make for people who are here in the building. Or who are
at Microsoft and might come by Building 99 in the near future. Jon sent several of the extra prosthetics
that they have that children have outgrown to us which we have on display in the lobby of Building 99.
You’re able to look at them and handle them, and touch them. We’ll have them on display there for a
few weeks.
After the talk Jon might go out in the lobby so people who want to look at them and talk to him about
them can see them. He also brought a few to pass around here. But they’ll remain on display for a
couple of weeks in case people from other buildings want to come by and check them out, thank you.
>> Jon Schull: Thank you.
[applause]
Let’s, here we go. Okay, so it turns out we have a story that just takes wing on the internet. There’ve
been a number of short videos that do a better job of telling my story than I do. If you’ll indulge me I’ll
give you a few minutes of a video that was done by Mike.com.
[video]
This is Lucy. Lucy doesn’t have a left forearm. She was born that way. Normally if Lucy wanted to get a
prosthetic arm it would cost thousands of dollars. That’s a lot of money for something she’ll outgrow in
a year. See this bucket of purple goop? Lucy is about to stick her arm in there to get fitted for a new
prosthetic device. But this one won’t cost her parents thousands of dollars. In fact, they don’t even
need to buy it, no one does. All they have to do is print it.
I’m Daisy Rosario. I’m on a mission to find tomorrow. But today my journey leads me to a scout retreat.
Here in Maryland an unlikely group of boys and girls are helping make affordable prosthetic devices a
reality.
What are you getting ready to do?
>>: Right now we’re just getting the printer ready to start a print.
>>: This is Sara one of these renegade scouts. Right now she’s showing me how to use a 3D printer.
>>: It’s saying it will finish in about twenty minutes.
>>: Oh, there it goes. This is Connor; he’s a Senior Patrol Leader.
>>: Alright guys, how many of you have seen these before or something like them? Wow, okay a lot of
you guys. Can I hear what they are, yeah?
>>: They are prosthetic hands.
>>: They are prosthetic hands. What was that, from a 3D printer, absolutely?
>>: This is a youth run retreat. The scout leaders can essentially talk about whatever they want.
>>: Everybody go like this.
>>: Today they’re talking about how to print hands for kids like Lucy and while interest amongst the
scouts is quickly growing. They can’t possibly keep up with the demand themselves. Every year roughly
one thousand babies are born missing all or part of a limb in the US alone. These scouts are part of a
worldwide network of volunteers with help coming in from youth groups, schools, makers’ faces, and
basement laboratories. If you ask any of those people whose behind this global operation they’ll all
point to a Research Scientist at RIT named Jon Schull.
How did you find your way to this?
>>: You know about twenty-six months ago instead of preparing a class I was looking at videos on
YouTube.
[music]
I came across one about a South African Carpenter who had a shop accident and accidently cut the
fingers off on a hand and was told that partial hand prosthetics are…
[video ended]
>> Jon Schull: I’m sorry. I pressed a button and the rest is history. Now…
[video]
This is Lucy.
>> Jon Schull: Not…
[video]
Lucy doesn’t have a left forearm she was born that way. Normally if Lucy wanted to get a prosthetic
arm it would cost…
[video ended]
>> Jon Schull: I’m so sorry. The question is can I advance?
[video]
This is Lucy…
[video ended}
>> Jon Schull: Not in any easy way that I know. Okay, so you’ve got the picture. It is a bizarre story I
have to say. I believe when we were interrupted we had this bearded guy telling the story of how he
saw a YouTube video of a South African Carpenter. Who had lost his fingers in a shop accident and had
worked with a Puppet Maker from Washington State named Ivan Owen. They spent a year collaborating
over the internet and came up with a 3D printable, primitive, mechanical body powered hand.
He mentioned that they’d come to realize that this would be useful for not just carpenters who chop
their fingers off in a shop accident. But for one in two thousand children he said at the time who are
born with some kind of an upper limb abnormality. He mentioned that he was putting the design
online.
That stimulated an idea I had had and failed to develop a year earlier at RIT where some of us hale from.
I had a bright idea. I made a Google map that people could put pins on. I put a comment on the
YouTube video. It said, because I noticed that there were people commenting on this YouTube video in
a positive way which as you know never happens, right. It’s usually the most demoralizing literary genre
in history. In this case people were saying this is pretty cool what this guy is doing. I would do that.
I put a comment on the video. It said, “I’ve made a map. If you have a printer and you want to help put
a pin on this map. If you know someone who needs a hand put a pin on this map”. It was just a little
experiment. I went off to work. When I got home there were seven pins on the map. In seven weeks,
in six week there were seventy pins on the map.
People started calling me and saying okay now what do we do? I had no idea. We created a Google Plus
Community. That community has continued to grow for about two and a half years now. As of last
night we had seven thousand four hundred and forty-four people signed up to a Google Plus
Community.
Something happened, right. It has become a global movement. What I want to do is tell the story of
this funny movement. The underlying technologies and some of the undercurrents that I think could
make it of interest to Microsoft Research types. As well as to people interested in digital philanthropy
and global spread of ideas, and world culture, and that kind of thing.
One of the really interesting things about this is that we have a global skunk works. Our own little
Microsoft Research, research and development community smeared all over the planet comprised of
high school students like Peregrine Hawthorn. Whose step-father is here it turns out and university
researchers, and engineers, all collaborating and working quite inefficiently and yet collectively
producing really a Cambrian explosion of innovative designs.
I want to walk you through that part of the story first. This was version one point one of the original
Robohand. Like the other devices that you will see it has two main components. It has a hand part and
a forearm part. If you have a wrist but no fingers you can put this on. Because there are strings
connecting these two components when you bend the wrist the strings get pulled and it makes a fist.
It’s that simple. It’s lightweight and it’s plastic and off it goes. That was the original Robohand.
Here with roughly the same color scheme is one of our newer models. You’ll see this is two years of
collective R and D. There’s a lot more going on but I’ll let these circulate. I will walk you through it.
Fairly early on a muscle physiologist in Nebraska got wind of what was going on, and learned how to do
3D design for this purpose. Created this design called the Cyborg Beast named because is four year old
son you should call it the Cyborg Beast. As you can see it was already a much more sophisticated and
quazi organic design.
But this one and this is actually young Peregrine on the right. His dad Peter Binkley on the left is the
Talon Hand which is our work horse particularly powerful design. When Peregrine put on the two point
o Talon Hand for the first time he was sitting at a bus stop. He accidently crushed a soda can. These
things have some real strength to them. One of the fascinating things of this story is the way these ideas
just sort of mix and match, and recombine like genes in a gene pool.
The Cyborg Beast and the Talon Hand begat the Talon Beast which combines some of the best features
of those two devices. But then the other thing is where the ideas are coming from. You saw that the
Talon Hand came from Peter and Peregrine. Peter is a French Teacher or was until he like the muscle
physiologist changed his career to get into this game.
But this guy Gregg Dennison is another dad. He’s an HVAC Installer. What he does is not rocket science.
What we do is not rocket science either. But he and his son Luke realized that for Luke to really get a
good grip on the important things in life he would really benefit from a hand that had not one but two
thumbs. This is the Luke Hand. This kid is now known around the world as Cool Hand Luke.
[laughter]
So it goes. I had this experience myself. I’m not much of a hands on guy. But I was very excited about
this in the first six months. For Imagine RIT we put out a call saying if you need an upper limb prosthetic
come on and we’ll fit you right there which is an incredibly naïve thing to say.
At Imagine RIT we had this thing and we learned a couple of weeks ahead that indeed we were going to
get a couple of candidates coming. Derrick was one of them. Nathan was another one. They both live
in Buffalo as it happens. They both didn’t have wrists. Here we were advertising come get a wrist
activated hand.
By the time Derrick got here I had a prototype of an elbow actuated version of the same thing. You
bend your elbow. You make a fist. I explained to young Derrick that this was an experiment. That we
needed a test pilot, could he be our test pilot? He said, okay. I said do you know what that is? He said,
no. I said, well it means that nothing is going to work and we need someone to tell us what to do. He
said, okay I can do that.
As I’m going you know going through my grown up coaching. He picks up this prototype. He picks up
another prototype. He puts them end to end and he says could my arm be this long? The Derrick arm is
in fact fifty percent longer than Derrick’s other arm. He can pick things up off the floor. He can reach
things from the higher shelves than his classmates. He’s the coolest kid in the class.
That has turned out to be an important theme here. With Derrick and with others to whom I get to give
a hand I have a ritual which makes me very happy and seems to engage them also. I say, I said to
Derrick, I said, okay, so today you’re getting a new arm. But in six months to a year you’re going to be
bigger. You’re going to need a new and better arm. We may not give it to you.
What I want you to do is help us figure out how you can use a 3D printer or work with someone else
who’s got a 3D printer and make new and better arms for other kids, as well. You know Derrick’s eyes
get wide and he sort of, he believes it. Frankly since he believes it I believe it too. This is sort of the
story. Indeed this is the first actual case of this pattern which I would like to imagine is part of the viral
phenomenon that I’m telling you about.
Steven Davies in England received one of our hands and within three or four weeks he had mastered the
fine art of producing the much more difficult and awkward RIT arm. In the last month he has produced
the unlimited arm which is again an elbow actuated thermo formable 3D printed arm. He’s now given it
to several kids in England. Our community is now rapidly taking this up, and so it goes.
But there’s another element to this whole thing. That’s sort of the story of the proliferation of these
designs. But there’s also a story about the proliferation of the ideas of these designs. Our, I like to call
this three year old our Director of Marketing. Because a year ago, only a year ago Christmas he got this
hand which had a certain color scheme.
They caught a picture of him saying look I got my new Ironman hand. While this kid may have been
born without fingers he was born with one of the great smiles in history. This was picked up by Fox
News. As this story and this picture went around the world within weeks the community was making
Ironman hands and Wolverine hands, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hands.
For that matter and this has now happened twice these Star Wars Clone Warrior impersonators which
apparently is a thing. Intercepted this kid coming out of a movie theater and they had produced a Star
Wars themed version of the arm for him. This whole is getting a little bit as I like to say, out of hand.
But the super hero notion, right, which came from our three year old Marketing Director turns out to be
a really very powerful scheme. We’ve even had the Marvel Live. There’s an outfit, you’ll learn a lot in
this business. It’s like Disney on Ice. Its Marvel characters live. They are now doing assembly events
where Marvel Super Hero actors work with families and kids to assemble and fit these devices. The
thing about the super hero metaphor is that it’s not a metaphor, right. I mean every super hero has got
some flaw. Then some super power that comes from that flaw. That’s sort of what’s going on here.
This kid actually was caught in an interview before he’d gotten his hand. It’s a really good controlled
study to talk about the psychological aspects of this, because he didn’t have the device yet. A very
articulate kid named, Nathan. Basically, he says it’s Thanksgiving. I’m counting the days until I’m going
to get a new hand for Christmas, he says. He doesn’t have it yet. He says you know I have bad dreams.
In these dreams there are monsters coming after me. Now, I just turn to them and I say you can’t scare
me because I’ve got two hands. This is before he’s even got the device.
This turns out to be a really important piece of puzzle. It’s not just the kids who are becoming
superheroes’. Nathanael’s hand was actually made by this class of middle school girls at a Catholic girl’s
school. Who had a teacher, some visionary teacher who figured out how to teach them Trigonometry
and Mechanics, and 3D printing, and design, and what all of that stuff is good for. If you look at their
faces you can see that while those girls may have learned all of those things. They also learned
something really important about the ability of technology to change lives. Not just of the people who
benefit from but from the people who get to develop these new abilities, these new technical abilities.
Then use them in new way to become part of really interesting new solutions.
This has become one of the big go to project based learning activities in the last year. Since last summer
we created the eNABLE Educators’ Exchange. There are now I think a couple of hundred teachers
around the world who are developing and sharing curricula that are making it possible for school kids to
make hands for other kids.
Although in some cases we’ve had school kids who got it together and convinced their teacher who
needed one of these devices and that they would make a hand for the teacher. In another case there
was a school superintendent who had a hand made by the kids in the class. It’s a very fun and
interesting thing.
Now remember most of what I’ve done is push that snowball down the hill. Then run along behind it
telling the story, right. I’m not a great designer. I’m not a great engineer. But I’m therefore very proud
of the fact that on day one I came up with a really good formula which was also an outright lie at the
time about what we were doing.
I put up this map when it had only a few pins on it. On day one I said we are and we weren’t. I said,
“We are a global, volunteer assistive technology network built on an infrastructure of electronic
communications, 3D printing, and good will.” I think that’s a really important recipe, right. I mean you
need real technology. We’re using two really interesting technologies. But we’ve also discovered that if
you can mix the third one in. What is more generative of good will than smiling children and weeping
parents, and rejoicing nerds, right, that’s sort of our formula.
There are demonstrably thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world
who are ready, willing, and able to take these amazing twenty-first century gifts. Use them to do things
that no one else does. That the commercial market hasn’t figured out how to do, that government
agencies haven’t figured out how to do. They and that is we find it to be one of the most rewarding
activities that we’ve ever been engaged in.
When I started this I thought it was sort of an interesting techno-social hack. But like everyone else I’ve
gotten totally wrapped up in the communitarian as well as innovative aspects of this. I think for many
people this just sort of captures a vision of how things might go.
But there’s another thread in this whole story. I’ve mentioned it a few times already. It’s the way these
ideas are spreading. The way it’s, in some ways the spread of these ideas is a metaphor for the spread
of ideas not just about technology, but also about humanitarianism, research and development, and for
that matter self-driven science and medicine. In a way that I think it’s really indicative of some trends
that are going to become very prominent.
There’s, right now we have a community that are doing research and development on, if you will,
prosthetics. But there are emerging communities that are developing drugs and nutraceuticals, and
genes which are using this same basic model of internet sharing. To figure out how to, I don’t want to
say circumvent the university and medical, industrial establishment. But they are circumventing.
They’re about to do that and it creates some really interesting opportunities and some really interesting
things to worry about.
This little video clip just tells a particular story about an R and D, one of the few research and
development pieces of the puzzle that I was involved in, so I like to show it. But it was captured because
I’m the guy they interview. Let me just give you a little bit more about how these ideas spread.
[video]
The designs are all free and open source. The information instructions are all free and easy to access.
Frankly, the devices themselves we give away for free.
>>: What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to almost like fast pace what you would originally do with
research and development. You have one idea here and you have another idea here. You have
someone who can help you make that idea either happen or even better.
>>: There are no single inventors here.
>>: He just published a sketch. A high school student on a summer job in lab across the country, in the
same evening he started working on a CAD design trying to test Jon’s idea.
>>: He published his findings. Then Steve Wood ended up refining that and making it so that it would
work in a hand. Then further it was refined to what we have currently by Skip Metzing who works at our
lab.
>>: Re-invented a device that was named in the nineteenth century I think called the Whippletree. I’ve
been told recently that it was used for horse carriages.
>>: It was an idea that was taken through different members of the community and finally realized into
what it is now.
>>: Today we now have what’s called a tensioner box which snaps into the groves of the Raptor Hand,
which contains the Whippletree, which is derived from that whole experimental lineage of half baked
ideas, which is producing a pretty slick package right now.
>>: In our community we introduce improvements monthly.
>>: Now I can name most of the people who are involved in that process. Except what about the
twenty or thirty people who cheered it on or who offered criticism. Or who said this didn’t work but
that information was useful.
>>: Our goal is to totally democratize the process so that any amputee can find an appropriate device
and get access to the information and the design files, and make themselves an assistive mechanical
device.
[music]
[video ends]
>> Jon Schull: Five careers ago I was a Biological Psychologist. I was interested in learning and
evolution, and social evolution, and the spread of ideas and the spread of software through society.
Actually I’ve given up tenure twice. The first time I gave up tenure is because I had a hunch that this
internet thing was going to be cool and interesting. That it was going to become a laboratory for the
study of the spread of ideas.
At the time I actually had an idea for a digital rights management scheme which was sort of a marriage
of copy protection and copy encouragement. I said this is going to be a really interesting technology for
looking at the spread of ideas through society.
I did some theoretical work just before I jumped from academia to which I eventually returned when; by
the way that entrepreneurial adventure blew up with the bursting of the first bubble. In particular I was
interested in some notions of organic selection in evolution and some notions of Demic evolution.
Sewall Wright’s notion that the reason evolution can be so effective and the way it would be most
effective is if, and just for those of you who might wonder what these are pictures of. This is meant to
be an adaptive landscape. The notion is evolution is the movement through a multi-dimensional space.
But let’s pretend it’s a two dimensional space. There are really adaptive places to be which are the
adaptive peaks. And so all of evolution, all of adaptation; all of problem solving is a matter of finding
your way to the best available peak.
As you can see if you have a very simple heuristic, which is the way we typically understand natural
selection or learning, or trial and error. You can get stuck on a local adaptive peak because it’s downhill
in every direction. Yet if you had some way of exploring your way you could find your way to even
better places.
It’s a very powerful idea. One might imagine that societies or political systems, or individual people are
sort of stuck in a rut. It turns out there’s been so theoretical work on this. That if you imagine that
instead of one population clumped in one place you have as you often have a population with many subpopulations. Those many sub-populations are in loose communication with each other. These would
be, this would be a gene pool for example in many niches which occasionally share genetic information.
Or it could be a bunch of individuals and teams on the internet who work in small groups or
independently. Only occasionally share information with each other.
Then these smaller groups are not going to be as centripetally driven, not going to be as likely to clump
in a particular adaptive peak. They’re going to wander broadly over the adaptive landscape. Some of
them are going to blunder into a new better peak. They’re going to pull more and more people
together. They’re going to find their way to the higher and better peak. Then of course because there is
information sharing across them eventually the whole population can potentially move to the adaptive
peak.
This was very abstract theoretical work that I was doing before I left academia. But I convinced myself
that I was leaving academia in order to study that. You know in the next ten or twenty years it became
clear that I was coning myself. Yet in the last three years I find that I’m in that kind of an environment in
which we are looking at a collective problem solving community. Spread all over the world.
This is just a scene from that Google Plus Community which you saw an illustration of in that last video
clip. We’ve got twenty or thirty posts a week. It’s a really interesting mix of parents saying this is my
little boy, can you provide a hand for us? Professional teams like the Open Bionics Group sharing case
studies and stories about their new motorized devices which we are working towards.
This guy is a new father. He’s Shalom Ormsby from Autodesk in Oakland just had a baby born. He knew
it was going to be born needing fingers. He’s just devoted himself to a twenty year project to develop a
next generation full featured arm for his son. He’s a very talented designer. He’s sharing information
with us. Then of course you’ve got all of these design challenges and kids involved, and so on.
But that Google Plus Community is just part of an ecosystem which is growing like crazy. There are
these perhaps fifteen websites around the world. There’s an eNABLE Hungary. Who knew? I didn’t
know. You came up with eNABLE Hungary?
>>: I came across, yeah. I’m from Hungary.
>> Jon Schull: Oh, I see. Well there you go. They just broke their, they had set a goal that they wanted
to make forty hands to take to Ghana. They’ve done it. They’re on their way to Ghana.
There’s this whole thing going on. I can tell you on good authority that no one knows what this thing is.
But it’s a huge opportunity for understanding what it is. This evolutionary tree which I showed you was
handcrafted by me. It turned out to be a very useful tool. But it took a lot of time to handcraft it. These
designs are smeared all over the internet at websites like Thingiverse and YouMagine. There are about
a dozen of them now.
These things are all derived from each other. When I come to Microsoft Research I want to make a
point of saying it would not be hard to write some software that would track these things down. Keep
track of which designs begat which designs. Then produce not just a map but an interactive guide to all
of these designs. It would help people navigate, figure out where they are in the tree, whether they’re
using the more recent version. Be able to begin seeing what’s going on.
This is the growth curve of the Google Plus Community. But I don’t even know how to get right now a
growth curve of all of these other communities. Growth curves are nice, but the real problem is
understanding who’s doing what. How the real, real problem how can you facilitate their collaboration
which is really what we’re working on these days.
Here’s just an example of an opportunity that I think is just sitting there within at least the Google Plus
Community. If you look at this growth curve you realize that every uptick is another person. Every day
is another day and if a person posts more, once or more per day they would fill up a little cell like this. If
when you moused over a little cell like this you got information about what they were talking about. If
you then clicked into it you could get to it. If they were color coated by tags or by themes, and so on,
the haystack becomes a navigable repository of a huge amount of information which right now is just
precipitating into the sediment is our situation.
Similarly there is obviously some kind of a social network here to be illuminated. Now as everyone
knows many attempts to say who’s connected with whom and doing what end up producing the same
rats nest that you see everywhere. Visualizing this effectively is a challenge. But this is an example of a
display which takes the same information of who is connected to whom. Or who’s talking to whom. Or
what topics are related to what topics. It will resort them in such a way that these clusters become
apparent.
This is a visualization done in D three JS. I think it’s a particularly promising one. But there are dozens of
really particularly promising ones. While no one has done it again this shouldn’t just be eye candy. It
should be a way of drilling into the data.
I would like to see all of these kinds of visualizations applied to this larger ecosystem because it has
become a really interesting laboratory for the study of how good ideas. I mean good ideas in the sense
that there are good ideas and in a sense that there are really nice ideas, right. This is basically a network
which is trying to promote a kind of goodness that everyone really captures. To facilitate that spread of
digital humanitarianism.
Another problem one has in this world. We have seven thousand people in the Google Plus Community
that we can identify. Who are they? Who’s the right person to collaborate with if you’re working on a
particular problem?
Many of us are interested in what’s called Gamification or Badging. But you know there are badges and
there are badges. There are badges that allow you to be at the top of a leaderboard. There are badges
which allow people who know the code to look at you at a glance and say, whoa, that guy was involved
in that. That’s the person I want to talk to, right. Not just, hello, my name is Meredith. But hello, my
name is Meredith and I work on assistive technologies, and so on.
The data about who you are and what you’re interested in is of course all available on these websites in
these forums, in these blog posts, and so on. The notion is, and in Google Plus at least in particular your
Avatar is a circular image. I propose that we use the periphery of the image and each spot along that
clock face represents a different kind of contribution. The number of concentric rings shows how good
you are at making arms. How good you are at making hands. How good you are at defining challenges
for the rest of the community. How good you are at supporting other members. Then at a glance you’d
begin to just see who’s who, what’s what, and who would be good to work on for what purpose.
When I started this I used this sentence. But in fact I’ve come to realize that what we have here is not
really restricted to 3D printing. This infrastructure of electronic communications, emerging
technologies, and good will is a huge opportunity. At the rate we’re going it’s conceivable that we’ll
either implode or explode. Or make the issue of 3D printed prosthetics no longer be a sexy problem
looking for a solution.
But by the time that happens we’re going to have tens or hundreds of thousands of digital technologists.
Who know that this kind of thing can work and who will use the latest emerging technologies. I think
that you know devices like the HoloLens is a great example of something that could be a Swiss Army
knife of assistive technologies for all sorts of people.
I can imagine reading glasses for the blind. You’ve got a camera and it reads into your ear whatever
you’re looking at. Or subtitles for the deaf superimposed on the person you’re talking to because you’ve
got speech recognition software going on, or cues about emotional response for autistic people, and so
on.
All of those, I mean you’re creating the platform. There are vast numbers of people who are going to be
fluent in that platform for other reasons. Who are going to have an opportunity to start developing new
kinds of solutions which may or may not have commercial markets and will still find it’s hugely
rewarding to do that.
The story spreads through this combination of smiling children, weeping parents, and rejoicing nerds.
News articles every time and it’s still happening to my astonishment there’s always some town that is
for the first time getting a kid who’s receiving a 3D printed hand from this mysterious group on the
internet. Local news picks it up. Once and a while the kid is really telegenic and it goes global.
This thing continues to spread so much so that if I may say we have formed the Enable Community
Foundation, a not for profit organization. Whose job is to try to wrap our hands around what’s going on.
The ecology as I’ve tried to show is very rich. These numbers are probably off by a factor of two. I
haven’t updated this slide. Well, if that was sixty-three hundred volunteers maybe it’s off by thirty
percent.
But there’s this complicated and growing ecology. There are various communities of people. There is
the Enable Community Foundation. By the way it has only three and a half full time staff right now. To
try to shepherd a community of seven to fifteen thousand volunteers who want to be told how to be of
service. We’ve come to learn that the solution to seven thousand volunteers is not more volunteers.
You need some non-volunteers.
What I’m working on these days is trying to figure out how to build up the Enable Community
Foundation. Our mission is to research and grow an effective community of digital humanitarians.
Starting with 3D printed prosthetic hands. But I don’t think finishing with 3D printed prosthetic hands at
all.
I think it’s a really interesting laboratory for the study of all of these emerging trends. Right in the
middle of it we’ve got a focal phenomenon which we just lucked into. But which happens I think to be a
really good place for exploring these specific problems. How can we provide inexpensive upper limb
prosthetics in a world in which strangely they have not been available?
The more general problem of how can you organize a global community of digital humanitarians?
Which apparently is available and ready to make real contributions and the deeper problem still of
understanding what it takes to optimize and understand the spread of valuable ideas. Through cultures,
societies, academics, corporations, and the human condition.
Roughly speaking that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I think it’s a really great space. I suspect that
some of you will find it extremely rewarding to dabble in it one way or the other. Our operators are
waiting for you call.
[laughter]
Thank you.
[applause]
I’m told we have time for questions. I would be happy to get questions or actually comments about any
of your own thoughts about where this ought to go. Yes, sir?
>>: Question, have you just focused on upper limbs?
>> Jon Schull: Yes.
>>: Have you explored any lower limb?
>> Jon Schull: We have. It turns out there’s, we’re in a sweet spot with regard to regulation as well. It’s
partly because we’ve been well behaved. No one wants to try to take hands and arms away from these
disarming children.
But the FDA has now said on record and I quote it on video. I think it was a moment of weakness. But
there was regulator from the FDA saying you know everyone complains about the FDA and its
regulations. How eNABLE is sort of outsmarting the FDA. But he says I’m here to tell you that we have
the ability to make discretionary categories. As long as they’re working on upper limb body powered,
non-commercial devices they don’t owe us anything. We like what they’re doing.
Well, that’s great and that’s why we’ve been very lucky and very successful in working in that space. But
in truth we’re going beyond, we will probably end up going beyond non-commercial. We are indeed
exploring lower limb. We are indeed exploring motorized.
But we are focusing in this sweet spot because frankly we’re still trying to figure out how to do what
we’re going to do. But I think the potential is great. I think we’ll probably do lower limb overseas in
collaboration with some groups where their regulatory constraints are lower. The need is greater.
You know I should point out so far we’ve done maybe two thousand devices. They’ve mostly gone to
kids who are already among the luckiest kids in human history, right. These are upper middle class kids
connected to the internet by caring parents who have found their way to nice people from their same
milieu.
It’s great but the need especially in war zones and disaster zones is huge. We have some technology.
We have an approach which can potential go much more broadly to people who really, really need these
things. That’s sort of our mission for the coming year.
I was mentioning that just in the last few weeks we were fielding inquires from the Middle East and from
India, and from Bangladesh. Muhammad Yunus likes what we’re doing. We’re trying to figure out how
to scale this and go global. But the irony is I’m finding myself having to say but we can’t really do it
when we only have three people on staff. We’re just trying to keep up with all of these people who’ve
said I’ve heard you’ve got a hand for my little boy or girl. That’s where we’re at. I’m sorry, yes ma’am?
>>: Do you have any approaches to quality control…
>> Jon Schull: We do.
>>: Once you’re starting too really you know work with people overseas and stuff like that? How do
you propose to…
>> Jon Schull: Yeah, I wouldn’t go as far as to say how do I propose. But I can tell you how do I think we
may do it. Right now we already have a process for qualifying our makers. I predict that there’s going to
be somebody in this room who says this is cool. I wanted an excuse; we answered one of the great
questions of the twenty-first century I like to say. That question is honey why did you buy that
machine?
[laughter]
There are people who are looking for an opportunity to get a 3D printer and this is it. One of you is in
this room. You’re going to make a test hand and you’re going to send it in. We’re going to evaluate that
first. Is this maker capable of producing a competent hand and following the instructions, and being
persistent enough to deal with these finicky printers, and this mixed, etcetera?
We are now with some funding from Google.org creating a data collection infrastructure to track
recipients and find out how they’re using them, which designs work for which cases, and so on. We are
developing alliances with the much abused prosthetists whose reputations we’ve sullied. But who are in
fact experts on when we can do what we do safely. When we should keep our hands off because people
with non-standard conditions and many of these conditions are non-standard, or who have post
traumatic amputations, need professional medical attention.
In these engagements we are, especially the ones overseas where we’re, pardon the expression, at
arm’s length from what’s really happening on the ground. We’re looking for medical partners we can
work with. We’re beginning to pull those partnerships together and do pilot studies in partnership with
local prosthetists or physicians where we explore the applicability of these things.
>>: Are you paying those professionals?
>> Jon Schull: In Haiti, well it’s interesting. The short answer is so far we are not paying the
professionals. So far there is a subset of the professionals who will say often in a low voice I really like
what you’re doing. You’re creating some new techniques which will become a part of our discipline.
Meanwhile let us know if we can help. But they keep their voices down because there’s another group
of voices who say you’ve got a bunch of amateurs trying to do medicine on. They don’t say this but they
could say it, trying to do medicine on innocent children and vulnerable parents. They have a real point.
By saying what I’ve just said out loud and by trying to collaborate with the various groups. By being
actually fairly cautious our waiting list is growing. I think we’ve managed not to be involved in any
actual injuries yet which you know some kid will have a bicycle accident while riding one of these
devices. Then the legal issues and the insurance things and so on are going to come to bare. That’s sort
of a review of the kinds of ways we are cautiously trying to address those issues.
>>: But you’re not baring other makers from taking these sides, right…
>> Jon Schull: Not at all. It is all open source, that’s right.
>>: Where is the way, who is holding the waiting list? Why, if I was a concerned parent why would I
appeal to you when I can go…
>> Jon Schull: One of the things the Foundation does is it says if you need a hand give us these
measurements, these information. We have some volunteer prosthetists who will review questionable
cases. If the cases are passed we will then match them up with some of these qualified volunteers who
we have identified.
We’ve also created software called Handomatic that runs in a web browser. That can be seen in public
libraries these days in which you can walk down, sit down at a computer connected to a printer in a
library. It says what model hand do you want? What are the measurements and it will generate the
files in minutes which in principle can be printed in the library. That’s Handomatic and libraries are
becoming Handomats.
That’s a self-service scenario which has been used on a number of occasions. There are many ways this
thing could roll out. We don’t know yet how it’s going to roll out. Yes, sir?
>>: Have you looked at any scenarios where the hand exists but it’s dysfunctional, as in say Cerebral
Palsy or stroke?
>> Jon Schull: Yes, as a matter of fact. In my lab and it turns out in a prosthetist in Singapore has
adapted some of her designs and produced an exoskeleton basically for the hand. Where when you
move your wrist or your elbow the fingers are lifted, your own fingers which are connected by strings
are sort of lifted or closed for exactly that kind of an application.
There’s an example of another upper limb application that we are already working on. We have a little
bit of funding from a small foundation for children who have had hemispherectomies who often have
that kind of limb weakness. They can move their arm but they don’t have fine motor control. As you
probably know it can happen in other scenarios as well.
>> Meredith Ringel Morris: I have a question from someone who’s watching remotely. They ask what
about machining or milling parts of lightweight or higher strength materials?
>> Jon Schull: Yeah, we have the opportunity to occupy these sweet spots right now. Right now 3D
printers are ubiquitous and cool, and they make pretty nice devices out of consumer plastics. If you
were going to do this at scale or if you were going to do it for people with heavy functional
requirements, you know ABS or PLA plastic is probably not the right material.
We are interested in injected molded plastics. We’re interested in the possibility that when our designs
stabilize or when we have a design that is stable and good enough that it really makes sense to do it at
scale. We would then look at some of these other fabrication techniques. As I say, right now we’re
about 3D printed body powered plastic hands. But more generally we’re about this whole question of
how can you create an ecosystem in which appropriate solutions will bubble up as they become
possible.
>>: It sounds like you have the opportunity to test liability and open source for the world…
>> Jon Schull: Yes, I look forward to that.
[laughter]
>>: Have you received any legal guidance to date about this issue? How are you kind of thinking about
that moving forward?
>> Jon Schull: Right, so we have the usual disclaimers, right. These are experimental devices. They
should be used at your own risk. No warranty of any kind, etcetera, etcetera. We advise and urge our
volunteers to make sure they get the signatures from the parents. If they parents come through us, or
the recipients come through us they sign those disclaimers. But as you know anyone can sue anyone for
anything anyway.
There are also issues about the licensing, right. There can be licenses attached to the designs that will
obviously enforce their open sourced-ness and may also enforce the notion that you use at your own
risk, etcetera, etcetera.
If we’re ultimately sued and who we are is as has been a little bit unclear. But now that there’s a
foundation there’s a good chance that the president of the Foundation would be a good person to go at.
We do have board director’s liability insurance. We have a law firm that is helping us prepare this.
By the way it turns out there are law firms associated with libertarian think tanks which are dying to
have someone come after us. I’m not looking forward to any of that. I think we’ve actually been quite
successful at being you know this funny mix of ambitious and yet humble about what we’re doing. That
I don’t think we’re, I hope we’re not a really attractive target. That by the time we are an attractive
target some of these governmental and legal, and institutional buttresses will be better in place.
But frankly here we are. The secret of our success is that we’ve gone forward to solve a solvable
problem before we had figured out how to solve all of the eminent problems, foolish perhaps.
[laughter]
Yes?
>>: You talked about expanding beyond 3D printing, expanding beyond on this. Are there any examples
of technologies you’re investigating now concretely? Like just software or software plus other
technologies.
>> Jon Schull: Just some examples. I mentioned heads-up displays. I mentioned other body parts. At
the conference that, were you in Lisbon?
>>: No.
>> Jon Schull: But I’ve seen you before, so, no, no, no.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Jon Schull: Maybe, maybe so. But I saw Meredith in Lisbon and I was sensitized to an idea that I am
looking at right now which is that line graphics like graphs for the blind for schools is a real opportunity.
I can now tell you as other people could tell you. That you can use a 3D printer to print skinny little lines
on paper, so there’s an example of a non-prosthetic application. That would take advantage of our
existing community. The existing technology base that we have and could create a situation in which
kids or teachers, or anyone else with 3D printers could now produce on the fly graphics for classrooms.
That would be great for STEM for the blind. There’s an example of an application where we could
probably expand without radically changing what we now have. That’s, frankly that’s our challenge,
right. How do you hang onto the tail of the tiger and expand the scope of what we’re doing without
getting overwhelmed or without setting false expectations? Or disappointing people who you don’t
want to disappoint because they’re so nice and cute and they really want it. Yes?
>>: Yeah just [indiscernible] the question earlier. About looking at the prototype or I mean the product.
Maybe you have a direction like providing, like a supply on it and using more [indiscernible] material
motorized to fabricate them on countries where they like don’t have access to you know 3D printers or
plastics, because I’m thinking about [indiscernible].
>> Jon Schull: Yeah.
>>: You know I can just see the…
>> Jon Schull: Well, you’re absolutely right. That’s right this design…
>>: Just a flap…
>> Jon Schull: Yes, this basic design was actually first done in the nineteenth century for a sea captain
made out of ivory and metal. But it was the same bend your wrist, make a fist kind of a technology. It’s
frankly a little puzzling why it has taken this long for someone to come up with a hand like device that
would work roughly the way one of those scary hooks works.
But we are doing that and you’re right it doesn’t have to be done with 3D printers. Another project that
we’re involved in, so we did get a hundred thousand dollars for a pilot project to go to Haiti and we got
there, we put out a call. There was a moment in Jeremie and I say we and it’s not me, as ever.
But the team that was down there was at a church on the western edge of Haiti. That had put out a call
saying people who need upper limb prosthetics we got some people who want to help. Eight out of
eight people had amputations just below the elbow. Apparently, if you break your forearm in that
environment they will often do an amputation up high to reduce the probability of medical
complications. Here we are with a bunch of wrist activated hands and they weren’t.
But we learned something else really interesting. This is just sort of a snapshot of where we are. They
said, and we said so, sorry but let’s understand what you really need. Turns out in Haiti and probably in
other places in the world disability and amputation is bad juju, it’s really stigmatized. There are people
who will be disowned from the family and who can’t go to church because they’ve got this curse. They
said, what we really want is something that fill out a sleeve and let me go to church and not attract
attention, and if it also has a little bit of function that would be nice.
For what it’s worth I have a scheme and I’m working with a student which goes like this. There’s very
little 3D printing involved. You take the good arm and you cover it with latex rubber. It’s fast drying and
then you peel it off and reverse it so you’ve got a rubber glove which is the flip arm, which is the match
of your existing arm. In side that you put probably made of wood or PVC pipe a mechanism which will
have 3D printed parts at the joints I think. Where you can take this arm which is now going to be
cosmetic in principle and when you grab it this way you can adjust it this way. You can adjust it this way.
It has a simple spring loaded thumb so that whatever you put in there is held. That’s not 3D printing but
it may actually address needs in a way that the particular solution we walked in with doesn’t.
There’s an organization called Tikkun Olam Makers in Tel Aviv. Tikkun Olam is a Hebrew phrase for
healing the world. They are now doing Makethons, assistive technology hackathons. Their next one is
going to be in Vietnam. But they’ve done about a dozen of them around the world where they bring
together problem solvers and need knowers which is actually a clever term, right. Because these are the
people who say I know what I need and I don’t have it. We will work with you, or will you work with me
and we’ll together generate that solution.
It’s an interesting complement to what we’re doing, to what we’re doing. They don’t have a system for
disseminating the solutions. But they have a great system for generating solutions and probably there’s
a place for a repository of solutions and challenges, and opportunities in the sky. That this global
community can connect to which is to say that we are sort of trying to be incrementalists. Going from
the problems we think we can solve towards nearby problems that we have some insight into.
But the general movement has got opportunities as well. That’s where I think this software that will tie
this whole thing together and make it visible can make a really big contribution. While I like doing
software I don’t have time for doing software right now. But I understand there are people at Microsoft
who do things with software. I’d like to talk to you about that. Yes?
>> Meredith Ringel Morris: Another question from someone watching remotely. Is there a place
presumably online where interested people can find some of the things that you’ve learned? For
example, the thing you learned about the need for the upper limb or the cosmetic limbs in Haiti. Is
there a repository of that kind of knowledge somewhere?
>> Jon Schull: There’s not yet. That’s actually the project that we’re talking about with Tikkun Olam
Makers. But if you go to the Google Plus Community, if you go to EnableCommunityFoundation.org you
will be shunted eventually if you look for it. To the Google Plus Community or to the Forum, or to the
Facebook page, or to any of a dozen places where there are people working and talking about these
kinds of things. If you ask questions, including asking questions of moi I can connect you with the
relevant people.
I mean you know one of the ironies that while it’s a lot of people and doing a lot of things. It’s a small
world network also. If you’re willing to say here’s what I’m trying to figure out someone will jump up
and say I know who you want to talk to.
>>: You have another unique opportunity you talked about the finickiness of consumer 3D printers.
>> Jon Schull: Right.
>>: You’re probably in a position to do a study and determine which of the printers are less finicky than
others which have better outcomes. Have you considered doing anything like that?
>> Jon Schull: The Foundation turns out to be the mechanism for partnerships, right; seven thousand
individual volunteers can’t do that kind of thing. But the Foundation provides a negotiating partner.
There’s an organization called 3D Hubs which has, it’s an uber for 3D printer owners. They have thirty
thousand hubs around the world. They make the bold claim that they have a 3D printer within ninety
miles of a billion people. They’re doing reports monthly of what printers are being used, what kinds of
results they have, and so on.
They by the way are going to invite their thirty thousand hubs to make hands for us, and arms for us on
a volunteer basis. We’ll be a part of that but they’ll probably do most of the statistics. Because they
have huge numbers and they can look at more cases.
>>: I was just going to mention there’s also on the eNABLE Google Plus Forums there’s a lot of subgroups and discussions on there that are grouped by people with different printers. Like we’re on the
eNABLE Flash Forge sub-community and people will talk a lot there about, oh how do I tweak this setting
or that setting? To you know I couldn’t get the phalange to print without collapsing, what am I doing
wrong? There’s a lot of really good discussion on there with a pretty good healthy attitude to of we’re
not going to debate who’s printer is best. We just want to make it so you get the hands printed, but a
lot of really good information where people compare notes on there.
>> Jon Schull: Thanks.
>> Meredith Ringel Morris: Any other questions for Jon?
>>: Sorry, one last question. Do you have any sense of what failure might look like?
>> Jon Schull: What, what?
>>: Failure might look like.
>> Jon Schull: Failure, oh, yeah I got lots of failure scenarios.
[laughter]
>>: What keeps you up at night?
>> Jon Schull: Well, those are two different questions actually.
[laughter]
Or more, you know one failure scenario I’ve already mentioned. That’s where something bad happens
for statistical reasons or because some maker really did something he or she shouldn’t have. A lawsuit
or a terrible story spoils the whole glow about this which is an important part of what’s going on.
What actually keeps me up at night is the dynamic tension between this global community of
individuals, this whole ecosystem. The requirements and the opportunities of a legal non-profit
foundation which is trying to really do things that the global community can’t do.
On the one hand we want to compliment the community. On the other hand we want to support the
community. On the other hand our job is to get the big job done not just to deal with the members of
the community. Figuring out how to strike that balance, how to be constructive and appreciated
stewards of the ecosystem is a really difficult and interesting problem. It’s one of the reasons I would
like some more visibility into the larger movement. In order to do it right and in order to allow the
movement to know what its own opportunities are.
To answer your question the failure I worry about is that there will be a divergence of the Foundations
activities and culture driven by what we get funding for. And driven by what are the global
humanitarian needs versus what the community is, what their manifest destiny which is of course to
tinker and work on a small bore basis. Those are potentially two different cultures. But there are lots of
ways in which they could come together. We’re working on getting them right. That’s actually that’s
what worries me.
But there are other scenarios, another scenario which is a failure that I will call a victory. Is that some
company and we’re watching them will step in and say you know these guys have demonstrated there’s
a global market that’s ten times the size of the existing prosthetics market which is unserved. We can
do what they’re doing. They may well put us out of business in which case as you know we will be, we’ll
move on to the next opportunity to create new solutions. That’s actually a failure to be looked forward
to.
>> Meredith Ringel Morris: Thank you so much.
[applause]
>> Jon Schull: Thank you. Thank you.