14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen our share of prosthetic hands, we even got to write about most of them, especially since the advent of 3D printing technology, but it's probably never been made all that clear just how great these things can be.
Few things can really test a person's hand-eye coordination, not to mention speed of thought, like playing a musical instrument. Guitars can be particularly finicky.
And yet a young boy by the name of Diego Corredor can play the guitar just fine despite lacking an entire hand. And he can do it a whole lot better than many amateurs out there.
How is this possible? Apparently, thanks to a 3D printed prosthesis that took only a few hours to make from filament worth around fifty bucks.
Normally, a mechanical prosthetic costs a thousand times as much, and is made over a period of weeks, even months. You can imagine what the implications are.
The prosthetic hand
The guitar player in the attached video and image gallery got help from a Columbia-based company called 3Dglück.
The founders, Juan Camilo Monroy, and Andrea Monroy, met Diego Corredor and learned about his position, and the issues he'd been having with other prostheses.
In a nutshell, they were sufficient for grabbing a glass of water and drinking it but not much else. He preferred not to wear them at all because of that.
Juan found out about his interest in playing the guitar, however, and related to him due to being a guitarist himself, so he set about designing a prosthetic that would be especially well suited for the instrument.
Since Diego didn't really care if the prosthesis looked like a hand or not, that gave Juan quite a few options. The only specification was that it had to be Linkin Park-inspired. You can see the result for yourself in the video below and the image gallery.
The secret to the success
In truth, it would not have been all that easy to pull off if guitars couldn't be played with picks. However, they can, so it all boiled down to a prosthetic that could hold the guitar pick securely enough for the strings to be properly plucked.
Using, say, a violin bow would probably be significantly harder to do with a prosthetic, due to how many subtle wrist and finger motions are involved. We still have hope though.
