Page 31 - Mobility Management, July/August 2021

manufacturer can create a better mold, and we can do it more quickly and eventually ship the products quicker to the supplier.”
Rick Weddle, Rehab Product Sales Specialist at PinDot, said,
“I was around in those days of making plaster casts. I used to go into people’s homes with a simulator — and we used to do carves before we even had molding simulators. Those were seven- or eight-hour appointments, so when the simulator came along, that was fantastic.
“[Prior to that] you were taking the mold, and then when you finished, you were telling the family, ‘We’re going to have to spread a tarp out in the living room and put the simulator on
it, and then I’m going to be dipping plaster casting strips into a bucket of water.’ It was a two- or three-hour process, waiting for the casts to set up. Compare that to now with the 3D imaging technology that we have: We transfer the patient out of the
mold, you put your marker indicators on there for the computer system, and within a matter of minutes, you have the 3D image. I think from that aspect, it’s a huge time savings for the end users because now that mold can be taken in their home and literally that afternoon, the manufacturer has the information they need to go to design and get it to production. It’s amazing.”
“I think the 3D imaging systems without question have
improved the quality of the molds, the capturing of the shapes and the images,” Bisson agreed. “Before that, you had to literally carve it out sometimes. And sometimes in years past, the mold didn’t match the client’s true shape. We had to use tape measures, tape, all kinds of tools to get it to fit. It would have taken literally hours to capture a mold. Think of all the energy being utilized, and think of the client. It was very taxing on them.”
Custom Seating Can Yield Incredible Results
“I think the expectation for a good image capture and a good mold has increased,” Weddle said. “There’s a much higher
level of expectation from our providers and the end user as well. As the image capturing technology improved, we were still left with a little bit of a labor-intensive manufacturing process, where a lot of the people in manufacturing still had to look at that image and do some things by hand. Now we have more accurate data coming in, and we have the manufacturing methods to take that data and actually produce the end product without it being nearly as labor intensive and get a more accu- rate end product.”
And for some clients, custom seating offers the best, most functional answer. Laurence remembered a client with both ALS
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