Selected sponsored research & development.

Combat medics operate in high-stress, high-risk environments, often under fire, striving to provide life-saving care to injured personnel. The development of low-cost robotic platforms capable of autonomous medical intervention holds the potential to save lives in situations too dangerous for human responders.

In this Phase I SBIR (Contract W81XWH17C0170), ALT LLC developed modular, additively manufactured high-dexterity end effectors suitable for performing or assisting in complex medical procedures across various robotic platforms. The effort included physics simulations of the hardware to evaluate capability across critical medical tasks, with control achievable through teleoperation or autonomous AI sequences.

The DOD requires surgical and procedural training models with a high degree of realism and functionality — incorporating synthetic skin, muscle, vessels, adipose, and connective tissue. 3D printing of synthetic tissues enables models to be fabricated and customized to specific scenarios, including unique anatomy, bone fractures, and medical conditions, at lower cost than conventional methods.

Incorporating self-healing functionality enhances simulations of fluid resuscitation whether from puncturing, cutting, or organ removal. Autonomous healing with high repeatability and low toxicity provides significant functionality for 3D-printed surgical trainers, improving medical training readiness while reducing cost and liability.

Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood, with more than 38,000 donations required daily. This project develops advanced methods to temporarily reprogram hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) to enable ex vivo production of blood in clinically relevant quantities — targeting the 2.5×10¹² red blood cells contained in a standard unit of blood.

A transfection-free method is used that can be translated into clinical use. If successful, this work will create a viable alternative to allogenic blood transfusion, impacting the $20 billion global blood transfusion market and the $53 billion EPO market, while improving safety and availability of blood for transfusions.

Despite advances in prosthetic technology, studies show a high percentage of users abandon their prosthetics. This project develops a preliminary prototype of a soft, self-healing bionic arm aimed at reducing abandonment and evaluating the feasibility of a low-cost (~$1K), modular, highly realistic below-elbow forearm and hand biomimetic prosthetic.

A biomimetic approach and novel low-cost multi-material additive manufacturing process is used to directly print embedded touch sensors and tissue simulants, integrating actuators and wireless control electronics. Self-healing tissue simulants repair and extend product lifetime, while embedded tactile sensors provide feedback to support functional capacity — including grip force, grasp speed, durability, and reduced mental fatigue.