• Question: what is the best thing you've made so far?

    Asked by Miss Marie to Tom, Sanjeev, Orla, Fiona, Eimear, Cillian on 3 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Orla McGee

      Orla McGee answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      Recently, I’ve been working on making a 3D printed a metal stent (a device used to open arteries that are struggling to let blood flow through them) that is quite flexible. Usually, 3D parts are quite stiff so trying to make one that is flexible and require a lot of design changes and overcoming a lot of challenges that arose due to the 3D printing process.
      I only got the new flexible stents successfully printed last week so I’m very proud of that work.

    • Photo: Fiona Malone

      Fiona Malone answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      I built a robot that simulates a stroke occurring. A stroke happens when not enough oxygen gets to the brain. A lot of the time, strokes can be caused by blood clots, but doctors and surgeons don’t know why some clots cause strokes and some don’t. I used 3D printing to build real life models of blood vessels that travel from a patient’s heart to their head. I then released man-made blood clots into the vessels to track where they go. My work showed doctors that smaller clots were more likely to cause a stroke than larger ones. My work also showed that having an irregular heartbeat like atrial fibrillation or heart palpitations increases your risk of having a stroke by 25%, which is huge!! I was also able to show doctors and surgeons that deal with strokes everyday how the clot moves around in a patient, which was really cool!

    • Photo: Eimear O'Hara

      Eimear O'Hara answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      Probably a shoulder implant, it took a lot of trial and error to get my first design so when I finally got to print it and hold it in my hands it was really exciting! (even if there were some problems that I’m trying to fix now)

    • Photo: Cillian Thompson

      Cillian Thompson answered on 4 Mar 2020:

      So far the best thing I made was for one of my classes in my third year of university which was like a virtual (fake) arm on the computer that I could control with my actual real arm I thought this was brilliant. I have also been able to 3D print a persons humerous bone (bone from your shoulder to your elbow) which was also very cool!

    • Photo: Sanjeev Kumar

      Sanjeev Kumar answered on 8 Mar 2020:

      I developed a wristwatch-integrated antenna that was successfully implemented for wireless monitoring of patient’s health parameters (such as blood sugar or oxygen level, body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate) at Mercy hospital, Cork, Ireland.

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