Collaborative design and manufacturing of a customizable voice prosthesis

An innovative approach to the development of biomedical devices must be intrinsically collaborative, because it requires a strict correlation among medical specialists and engineers, and a careful calibration of Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Tooling techniques in order to account for the required prosthesis design optimisation, customisation and lead time. In this paper, besides a discussion on some critical aspects relevant to the collaborative development of a voice prosthesis, some preliminary results on the functional design and the analysis of the fitting conditions of a composite mold manufactured using Rapid Prototyping (RP) techniques will be presented.