Unlimited Tomorrow Lowers Cost of Prostheses by 90% with Siemens and AWS

A single prosthetic limb for a child can cost tens of thousands of dollars, even though they will outgrow it in 12-14 months. But by revolutionizing the production process, Unlimited Tomorrow has dramatically reduced the cost of prostheses. Unlimited Tomorrow creates high-functioning, personalized limbs using software that transforms 3D scans into designs for 3D printing. And, with the help of Siemens applications powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company further streamlined its production process. This enabled greater access to prostheses for both children and adults around the world, including, most recently, victims of the war in Ukraine.

As a teenager, Unlimited Tomorrow founder Easton LaChapelle created robotic limbs for science projects. In 2013 he met a young girl wearing a prosthetic arm and spoke with her parents about the extreme cost—as much as $80,000—for a limb she would soon outgrow.

And that’s why LaChappelle started his company. His vision: To empower individuals with upper-limb differences by making high-quality, low-cost bionic prosthetic arms easily accessible to everyone who needs them. Today, Unlimited Tomorrow produces TrueLimb, a high-functioning myoelectric prosthetic arm, personalized from socket to fingertip. It comes with a breathable, comfortable socket lined with 30+ sensors for intuitive, precise control.

“Every TrueLimb is personalized to match shape, size, and skin tone,” LaChappelle said. “You can even paint the TrueLimb fingernails.”

As part of the fitting and design process, Unlimited Tomorrow uses 3D scanning via an app and custom software. This app collects photographs and measurements from each patient, which are used to create a unique customer ID. Once the data has been gathered, Unlimited Tomorrow digitally designs the sockets and uses 3D printing to build the socket and a customized prosthetic limb.

However, creating a 3D model of a socket from a 3D scan can be difficult. The company tried different computer-aided design (CAD) software options to address this challenge, but the solutions could not accommodate the level of detail and complexity needed in the outputs. So, Unlimited Tomorrow teamed with AWS Partner Siemens, whose expertise and software helped create the digital workflow. 

Credit: Unlimited Tomorrow

Unlimited Tomorrow uses the Xcelerator portfolio from Siemens that includes NX™ software for product engineering, as well as Teamcenter® X software for product lifecycle management (PLM). Together, these applications help Unlimited Tomorrow build and manage the virtual representation of its products—also known as the digital twin. The result is a solution that generates and manages designs from 3D scans, which then can be used for 3D printing. 

“NX technology has given us the opportunity to process the scanned data we receive from a client to create a limb that is unique,” said Matthew Landolfa, mechanical design engineer at Unlimited Tomorrow.

Integration between CAD and PLM is critical to the success of the digital twin. Teamcenter X provides integration to multiple CAD applications, regardless of the source. At Unlimited Tomorrow, this includes Siemens NX plus additional 3D CAD software. The result: A single unified assembly.

“We use Siemens NX and Teamcenter X to turn those 3D scans into sockets,” LaChappelle said. “Each prosthesis and set of sockets are made unique to fit perfectly and match the size of the person’s opposing limb.”

To store and process the complex 3D CAD files, the workflow uses Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon AppStream 2.0 provides high-performance streaming of both the NX and Teamcenter X applications. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is the source of the compute resources, while Elastic Load Balancing helps Teamcenter X achieve consistent high availability.

LaChappelle believes that AWS and Siemens enable and support the entire undertaking. “The biggest value-add of AWS and Siemens is the ease of integrating the AWS backend database into our mobile app and being able to manipulate the data in a very easy way.”

Having a digital workflow not only enables more efficient production, it also means Unlimited Tomorrow can create prosthetic limbs at a fraction of traditional prostheses—as little as one-tenth the price. That enables children to have new prostheses as they grow. When a customer outgrows a device, they can send it back to Unlimited Tomorrow for recycling and then be measured for a new one that arrives in weeks.

When war in Ukraine broke out in 2022, LaChapelle saw that many of the injured were left without limbs. That’s when the charitable division of Unlimited Tomorrow, Unlimited Tomorrow Global Initiative, began raising money to create and ship prosthetic arms to survivors, at no cost to them. Siemens and Singularity Group, an innovation company that believes technology and entrepreneurship can solve the world’s greatest challenges, are helping efforts on the ground.

LaChappelle said, “Ukraine is a war-torn country with little infrastructure. But we’re able to scan, fit, and deliver one-of-a-kind bionic prostheses very efficiently, enabling us to help amputees quickly in devastated areas.”

The future for Unlimited Tomorrow seems, well, unlimited. LaChappelle’s vision is to be the leader of human augmentation technologies to solve what was thought to be impossible. These products range from wearables to exoskeletons.

Unlimited Tomorrow is also focusing on machine learning (ML), virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI) to help create a more diverse set of products, including muscle modeling. “It makes me really excited to be able to condition data properly today so that we can really leverage its value in the future,” LaChappelle said.