Category: Enevra in Uganda

We saw our first patient already during our trip last year and were very excited to meet him again. Unfortunately he has some trouble with sensitive spots on his stump and phantom pain, which makes it hard for him to wear any prothesis at all. Nevertheless Johannes took his measurements and was able to start the first printing session after he solved some problems with the filament.
Here are some insights into the orthopedic workshop at CoRSU (https://corsuhospital.org/index.php): For example, at the moment they provide patients with a prosthesis after lower limb amputation, shoes for clumb foot and casts for broken bones or deformations.

On the 24th of March Johannes travelled alone to Kisubi, near Kampala, in Uganda. It was quite a challenge, but he managed everything very well. The next day, he visited CoRSU for the first time and introduced himself to everyone. CoRSU is a private, non-profit organization in Uganda. CoRSU provides help to people with disabling physical conditions, by ensuring accessibility of preventative, curative and rehabilitative services in Uganda and its neighboring countries. Johannes was able to set up our system in a lab of CoRSU’s orthopedic workshop facility that is specifically for 3D printing. CoRSU already works together with other organizations which use various 3D-printing techniques and therefore has some experience. In the next days Johannes is going to meet the first two patients!

At Enevra, our mission is to develop a reliable 3D-printing framework that can be adopted by local orthopedic and medical professionals to provide affordable prostheses to their patients. Our goal is to provide this framework to Enevra-partners in low-income countries. By enabling our partners to use the 3D printing technology, we will achieve two goals: First, we are making prosthetic devices more affordable and easier to manufacture. Thus, more amputees can benefit from a prosthetic device. Second, we are enabling the local professionals to enhance their toolkits. By using our system, partners can create their products faster.

To establish new partnerships in Uganda, Maike and Nikolas traveled to Kampala and had meetings with managers of the Mulago National Hospital and Katalemwa Hospital. We thank the local professionals for their interest and hospitality and we are looking forward to further exchanges.

When set up properly, 3D printing is a robust and reliable process. But in the first days in Uganda we struggled with our initial prints due to the instable power grid. The outages resulted in failed prints that stopped mid-way. To overcome this limitation, we opted for a solution: A UPS, short for uninterruptible power supply. This device ensures that our printer can print independently for as long as 20 minutes on a full charge of the device; thus short outages are now being compensated. We are happy to say that after installing the device, we were able to print without further complications.

When we traveled to Uganda, we already brought ready-made prostheses with us. This served as a backup for potential technical delays and situations where we would need a prosthesis quickly. And indeed, the first prostheses that we used were from this collection. We fitted them to the personal stump-shape of the participant by thermoforming. To ensure an even better fit, we take the measurements of our participants in order to adjust the shaft size for newly printed prostheses. On May 11, we had the chance to fit our first truly tailor-made shaft to our participant Collin.

Today we had a new study participant. He is a priest at the local church and even invited us to a service in two weeks. We are very happy to have taken measurements from a lot of participants already and we are looking forward to print their prostheses and how the reception will be.

To tailor our prostheses to local demands we try to use widely available materials and local sources. To adjust the color of the printed prosthesis, we use spray paint. Today we made a trip to Mukono to try the locally available paint.

After initial technical difficulties we are set and have printed the first hand prostheses. We already had the honor to work together with our first study participant and fitted our first hand prosthesis.

Furthermore, we conducted a very insightful interview with the amputee Mario, our local “prosthesis ambassador”, who helped us to understand amputees in Uganda better and established connections to other amputees. A first short glimpse of the interview can be found on our instagram post.