Bio-Meraki

Manufacture and design of upper arm bionic prosthesis using recycled plastics as manufacturing material to encourage clients on recycling plastics.

We have identified that more than 500 people are daily amputated from an upper extremity, where the majority of this community cannot afford a bionic prosthesis, after doing some researches we've found that these people are being affected in their daily tasks since they cannot complete them as they did it before, causing emotional/psychological issues. If these people could afford a bionic prosthesis they would avoid or even mitigate these daily issues.

Biomeraki offers low-cost bionic prostheses that are around 900 dollars, representing 0.35% of the cost of a bionic prosthesis on the market, offering access to bionic prostheses to the lower class and thus providing a better quality of life. These low costs are since the prostheses are manufactured by 3D printing, using filaments of organic origin and based on recycled plastics, the main printing filament is PETG (graphene polyethylene) which is present mainly in the plastic lids of the bottles, in this way it has a double impact since it allows us to reduce production costs while helping the environment by reducing the footprint of plastic.

These prostheses are designed for low-income people who do not have the economic capacity to acquire a bionic prosthesis at the prices currently offered by the market, allowing them to acquire a better quality of life by being able to develop better in their daily tasks

Our team is made up of biomedical engineering and software engineering students, allowing us to be in the right position for the development of the software and hardware required to carry out this solution in the best way. Currently, our team has six months of research and development of the first functional prototype which aims to be ready to be launched on the market in the second half of 2023

Firstly, an investigation was carried out on the upper limb amputee population in Latin America, after this, we discovered that only around 10% of this population is capable of acquiring a bionic prosthesis of those offered in the market, surveys of amputees have also carried out an upper limb and their families to know their needs in a particular prosthesis that we look for among different options to offer a functional and good quality prosthesis at the lowest possible cost to increase the percentage of the population that can acquire a bionic prosthesis. These prostheses are designed for low-income people who do not have the economic capacity to acquire a bionic prosthesis at the prices currently offered by the market, allowing them to acquire a better quality of life by being able to develop better in their daily tasks

We are incentivizing people to recycle in order to get a discount on their bionic prothesis, also we will be raising funds on the U.S once we get the healthcare approvals. These funds will be raised by campaigns on where all the people who buy one prothesis will be contribuiting to buy/reduce the price of our protheses to all of those who cannot afford one

Start selling 10 prothesis per year. We will achieve this goal by preparing the team on this kind of challenges and raise funds by different ways to increase our research and development process.

Recycling plastics (PETG) to fabricate bionic protheses, this will mark the difference due when people realize about the impact that they will cause by recycling this kind of plastics and not only on the enviroment but on the amputee people will make the difference.

We haven't fully launched our solution but currently we are 3 people who are serving on the project, we are expecting to have at least 6-9 people serving on this project next year

The budget, without funds we are not able to start the research and development process of the project.

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