The provision of wheelchair seating accessories, such as head supports, is often limited to the use of commercial products. Additive manufacturing has the potential to produce custom seating components, but there are very few examples of published work. This article reports a method of utilising 3D scanning, computer-aided design and additive manufacturing for the fabrication of a custom head support for a wheelchair. Three custom head supports, of the same shape, were manufactured in nylon using a continuous filament fabrication machine. The custom head supports were tested against an equivalent and widely used commercial head support using ISO 16840-3:2014. The head supports were statically loaded in two configurations, one modelling a posterior force on the inner rear surface and the other modelling a lateral force on the side. The posterior force resulted in failure of the supporting bracketry before the custom head support. A similar magnitude of forces was applied laterally for the custom and commercial head support. When the load was removed, the custom recovered to its original shape while the commercial sustained plastic deformation. The addition of a joint in the head support increased the maximum displacement, 128.6 mm compared to 71.7 mm, and the use of carbon fibre resulted in the head support sustaining a higher force at larger displacements, increase in 30 N. Based on the deformation and recovery characteristics, the results indicate that additive manufacturing could be an appropriate method to produce lighter weight, highly customised, cost-effective and safe head supports for wheelchair users.

中文翻译：

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评估用于定制头枕生产的增材制造：在静态负载条件下与商用头枕的比较。

提供轮椅座椅配件（例如头枕）通常仅限于使用商业产品。增材制造具有生产定制座椅组件的潜力，但是很少有已发表作品的例子。本文报告了一种利用3D扫描，计算机辅助设计和增材制造来制造定制的轮椅头枕的方法。使用连续长丝制造机，用尼龙制造了三个形状相同的定制头枕。使用ISO 16840-3：2014对定制的头部支架进行了测试，并与等效的且广泛使用的商业头部支架进行了测试。头部支撑以两种配置静态加载，一种模拟内部后表面的后向力，另一种模拟侧面的侧向力。后向力导致定制头枕之前的支撑支架失效。对于定制和商用的头部支撑，侧向施加了类似大小的力。卸下负载后，习惯恢复到其原始形状，而商品持续塑性变形。在头枕中添加关节增加了最大位移，与71.7毫米相比增加了128.6毫米，并且碳纤维的使用使头枕在较大位移时承受的力更大，增加了30N。从恢复特性来看，结果表明增材制造可能是一种适合为轮椅使用者生产重量更轻，高度定制，具有成本效益和安全的头部支撑的合适方法。