When it began, Standard Cyborg set out to make design of custom-fabricated orthotics and prosthetics easier and quicker – especially in parts of the world with limited medical resources, where the needs are often the highest.
Cofounders Garrett Spiegel, BE ‘10, and Jeffrey Huber, a serial entrepreneur, did just that. Standard Cyborg’s software is used across 23 countries on six continents. Thousands of patients have been helped through provider partnerships with private and non-profit clinics, NGOs, governmental entities and research groups.
Forbes put the pair on its 2018 “30 Under 30” list in the healthcare category and Standard Cyborg, based in San Francisco, remains part of the well-connected Y Combinator community. Huber, who was born with fibular hemimelia and wears a prosthetic leg below his left knee, received training, mentoring and seed funding in from the prominent Silicon Valley start-up lab in 2015.
With a solid and growing customer base for its O&P software, Standard Cyborg is expanding its capabilities to support custom design of other products, such as shoe inserts, fracture casts, knee braces and more. The team has developed what Spiegel calls a “geometry engine,” a platform that enables design of custom fit products for the body at mass scale.
“We always knew this was the piece of software we wanted to build,” said Spiegel, who founded the Vanderbilt chapter of Engineering World Health and is involved with the School of Engineering’s Alumni Mentor Program.
Think of it as CAD software built specifically for custom manufacturing. In standard manufacturing, designing a component may take days or weeks but that cost is effectively spread over thousands or millions of units.
The design cost for a custom prosthetic socket or shoe insert or even a football helmet is another matter entirely. Hiring 50 CAD engineers to design custom pieces, even in two or three hours, is too costly – for both companies and then ultimately to the customers. Every startup or established company that wants to produce affordable custom products – helmets, shoes, orthopedic braces, hearing aids, dental aligners, glasses, orthopedic implants, and more – slams against the same barrier, Spiegel said.
Even when the goal is to simply take a scan of a person’s face, torso, or foot and correctly size a garment, set of glasses, or pair of shoes, companies run into often insurmountable technical challenges given the existing tools.
Now, with Standard Cyborg’s new platform, designers can spend two hours on a product but save the work and automate changes so each additional piece takes seconds or minutes. The platform enables one time setup and then scalable production with automatic design of custom products or instantaneous sizing.
“We’ve created a generalized set of geometry tools that means companies don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Spiegel said. “This will be a system that removes a lot of hurdles. It is a big pain point.”
Standard Cyborg, which announced the platform online and at the 3DHEALS Conference in April 2018, is working with a handful of companies with custom products to test its ability to scale production.