Materials research

Andiamo was born from the experiences of its co-founders Samiya and Naveed’s with their disabled son Diamo. We are changing how orthotic services are delivered, to significantly improve the lives of disabled children and their families.

Our experience has shown how much of an impact orthoses have on a child’s life. The orthotics service is responsible for the creation of orthosis such as back braces. An orthosis is designed to straighten a part of the body. Without this the quality of life for a child is severely impacted and they are at higher risk of requiring major surgery. The service uses processes that are highly stressful, time consuming and error prone. Whilst also taking up to 17 weeks to produce an often ill fitting orthosis. The techniques used to deliver the service haven’t fundamentally changed in a 100 years beyond new materials.

The service aims to bring this down to 48 hours whilst increasing quality through the use of 3D scanning and printing.

We believe that the lessons learnt during this project will lead to a pilot with the NHS to explore scaling a user centred orthotics service. By leveraging the inherent flexibility and decentralisation that 3D scanning and printing allows.