The young daughter of a former Oahu resident will get a prosthetic hand made by a 3-D printer early this week in Las Vegas.
Diagnosed with Poland syndrome, Hailey Dawson has three fingers that are not fully developed between her pinky and thumb on her right hand.
"It looks like the shape of a shaka," said her mother, Yong Dawson, a former resident of Salt Lake, by telephone last week.
Dawson said her daughter, who will attend preschool in the fall, refers to her right hand as her "special hand," adding, "She’s been raised like there’s nothing wrong. She’s extremely independent."
So far, the girl has led a normal life, her mother said.
"The only thing she can’t do is grasp," she said.
The new hand will allow the youngster to ride a bike and play baseball.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas put together a team to create the prosthetic after Dawson sent an email seeking help to the department’s chairman, Brendan O’Toole.
The team includes Katherine Lau, whose mother is from Kailua and father is from Kaimuki.
Lau, a biomedical engineering major at Rutgers University, is home in Las Vegas to spend time with her family.
She became involved in the project through a connection from her mother. When O’Toole contacted Lau to ask whether she would be interested in becoming a part of a team, she quickly accepted.
"This is what I want to do," Lau said. "The whole reason why I wanted to be a biomedical engineer is to improve the lives of others."
People with Poland syndrome are born with missing or abnormal muscles on one side of the chest wall, according to the National Institutes of Health. Most people with the condition "also have abnormalities of the hand, which often involve shortened fingers, partial fusion of fingers or both," the organization’s website said.
The project started soon after O’Toole met with Dawson in June.
The team will do a final fitting of the prosthetic Monday or Tuesday and determine whether they need to make any modifications.
"It’s finally coming to fruition," Dawson said.
Before seeking assistance from UNLV and other institutions, Dawson worked with two separate businesses to create a prosthetic hand for her daughter, but those attempts fell through.
According to O’Toole, this is the first time the department is creating a prosthetic with a 3-D printer.
A 3-D printer is a machine that creates a three-dimensional object from a model by laying down successive thin layers of material under computer control.
The UNLV machine is about 6 feet tall with a large window.
The team created about 40 pieces for the prosthetic, which includes each joint of the fingers using a design from another prosthetic called Flexy-Hand. O’Toole said the hand is connected to a cable system to allow the fingers to clench when the wrist moves down and extend the fingers when the wrist moves up.
A type of plastic and a filament called NinjaFlex were used as materials, and a lining for the prosthetic was created by a physical therapist to prevent irritation to Hailey’s skin.
If the project is successful, Dawson said, she wants to start a foundation to help other children acquire cost-effective prosthetics made with a 3-D printer.
O’Toole said they already received several requests to create more prosthetics after Hailey’s story was reported in a local newspaper and broadcast on local television stations.
Creating a prosthetic with the machine costs about $200, compared with $20,000 for a traditional prosthetic, he said.
O’Toole praised the team he has been working with.
"It’s a really good group of people, great group of people," he said by telephone Friday. "We were all interested in trying to help somebody and trying to learn this new technology."
The team also includes Claire Ong and Kareem Trabia, seniors at Advanced Technology Academy; Ryan Schnitzler, a senior at Coronado High School; and Zachary Cook, a senior at UNLV. Trabia’s father, Mohamed Trabia, an associate dean of research at the university’s College of Engineering, helped with computer design modeling for the prosthetic.
