Sitting in a hospital in southern Uganda, University of Toronto researcher Matt Ratto had a brief moment of disbelief.

A 4-year-old girl named Roseline was trying on her new prosthetic leg, part of it made with a 3D printer in a process Ratto helped develop.

“She started to walk using these parallel bars, and I guess I had some kind of weird expression on my face,” Ratto recalled.

He’d been telling his students all year the concept would work, but “never really believed it.”

“That is something that’s kind of consistent with this project, that it always exceeds my thinking of what’s possible,” said the associate professor.

That clinical trial was in 2015 and the technology is at the heart of a new non-profit organization called Nia Technologies Inc. It aims to scale up the relatively simple and inexpensive solution across the developing world, where there’s a huge need for artificial limbs — due to problems ranging from accidents to landmines — as well as a shortage of the skilled technicians who make them.











According to data from the World Health Organization, in many low-income and middle-income countries only about 5 to 15 per cent of people have access to the assistive devices (including prosthetics, but also hearing aids and wheelchairs) they need.

“Our solution is not, ‘put a 3D printer on your shoulder and fly off to Uganda,’ ” said Ratto, adding that the non-profit social enterprise plans to sell the technology to hospitals, to be used by their own skilled technicians.

A relatively inexpensive 3D printer is connected to a laptop and the prosthetics specialist scans the patient’s stump. Special software analyzes the scan and a nylon socket is generated by the printer, to be attached to other parts needed for the full prosthetic, purchased from the Red Cross.

“Their current process takes about a week to make a single prosthetic, and with our system they can make it in about a day,” said Ratto, adding the new technology also cuts down on the time people need to be in the hospital to be fitted for artificial limbs.

Jerry Evans, the president and CEO of Nia, said having a prosthetic limb can make a “huge difference” in quality of life, and called the need “tremendous.”

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Evans said the goal is to have the technology set up in perhaps 50 to 100 hospitals over five years, which would constitute “some progress” on a giant problem.

He stressed local prosthetic technicians are the ones who will be in charge.

“We give them the tools, we don’t replace them,” he said.