Bone Recovery is Now 40% Faster With the Help of Osteoid

Have you ever experienced suffering a broken bone because of an accident or injury? Everyone knows what a broken bone means -- the terror of having to endure a heavy and awful cast. We all get the picture -- smells like a rotting meat and itches like a nasty rash after several days. But thanks to technology, all these horrible experiences will simply become a thing of the past.

And we are actually saying this because a Turkish student, in the person of Deniz Karashin took this revolutionary idea to the next step. 3D-printed casts, an idea that has been circulating for a couple of years now, could be the long-awaited answer in eliminating the odor and itch issues brought about by the traditional plaster casts. Karashin, winner of the 2014 Golden A'Design Award, designed the Osteoid, which is a cast prototype that uses tiny ultrasonic vibrations that speeds up bone healing time by 40 percent. The Osteoid medical cast offers a new way of addressing problems such as itchiness, bad smell due to the plaster's material, and patient's limitation to water exposure by introducing new technologies that will allow us to make custom-fitted, durable 3D-printed medical casts that will not itch or smell.

The Osteoid medical cast, with its design that leaves patches of skin open, makes it easy to administer the treatment using Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound (LIPUS). This bone stimulator system requires ultrasound leads to be placed on the skin, directly over the injured area of the bone. Osteoid's skeletal design enables ultrasonic drivers to be built directly into the cast.

Though the Osteoid medical cast is only a design prototype at this point in time, it's no surprise that in the next year or two, we will be seeing these kinds of medical solutions given the fast pace in 3D-printing technology.