Citation

Park JH, Lee JR. Polymers (Basel) 2019; 11(11): e11111800.

Affiliation

Department of Clothing and Textiles, Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Korea. ljrj@pusan.ac.kr.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publications Institute)

DOI

10.3390/polym11111800

PMID

31684002

Abstract

In this study, we present the development of fall-impact protection pads for elderly people using three-dimensional (3D) printing technology. To develop fall-impact protection clothing, it is important to maintain the functionality of the protection pad while ensuring that its effectiveness and appearance remain optimal in the process of inserting it. Therefore, this study explores the benefit of exploiting 3D scan data of the human body using 3D printing technology to develop a fall-impact protection pad that is highly suited to the human body shape. The purpose of this study was to present a 3D modeling process for creating curved protective pads comprising a hexagonal mesh with a spacer fabric structure and to verify the impact protection performance by printing curved pads. To this end, we set up a section that includes pads in the 3D human body scan data and extracted body surface information to be applied in the generation of the pad surface. The sheet-shaped hexagonal mesh structure was cut and separated according to the pad outline, and then deformed according to the curved surface of the human body. The pads were printed, and their protection performance was evaluated; a 79.2-81.8% reduction in impact force was observed compared to similar cases in which the pads were not used.

Language: en

Keywords

3D body scan; 3D mesh; 3D modeling; 3D printing; force attenuation; impact protection pad