Technologies
Instalimb is a technology start-up company that develops low-cost, high-quality 3D printed prosthetics and orthotics and solutions for its mass-production solutions, with the vision "Create a world where everyone in need can get prosthetics."
Producing prosthetics and orthotics requires skillful technique as craftsmanship and analog manufacturing process that Certified Prosthetists & Orthotists (CPO) have been applying with a huge cost for the equipment. With this reason, for example, a general transtibial (below knee) prosthetic leg is very expensive, ranging from three hundred thousand up to one million yen in estimation. Therefore, it is a serious public concern in the global society that 90 million people in the world, who need prosthetics, cannot afford to purchase one.
This is what exactly pushed us into development of customized mass production solutions, which is the world's first with the integrated automatic design system, composed of AI (machine learning) and 3D printer with 3D CAD software specially programmed for prosthetics and orthotics.
This new technology can make the equipment cost and the product price down by approximately 10% than the conventional ones and also the delivery time can become shorter. In addition, since this technology enables those who finish with only one-day training to manufacture the product, prostheses and orthoses can spread much easier over the world including the developing countries where such a spread out has been practically hard to happen.
We have already completed the development of the custom mass production solutions by the semi-automatic design (modelling) system for a below knee prosthesis. . During our joint research with the University of the Philippines – Philippine General Hospital, from April 2018 to January 2019, we worked on a pilot study with 50 actual patients, resulted in complete acquisition of medical evidence.
At present, Philippines is one of the developing countries and nearest of those from Japan that has 1.8 million people who need a prosthetic leg mostly due to diabetic gangrene (rotten foot) caused by poor state of nutrient intake. In fact, only 50,000 people (2.7%) out of such in need have an access to prosthetic legs. Only 1.23 million out of the 1.8 million are the possible number of patients who we can apply a below knee prosthetic leg to and according to this statistics, we can estimate our market value in the whole Philippines is around 50.8 billion Japanese yen.
We have started our business, selling low-cost below knee prosthesis, since May 2019.Initially targeting medium and high income people, with an annual income of about 250,000 Japaneseyen who occupy 80% of the 1.23 million.