Anyone who ever had to wear a traditional plaster cast during a healing period probably remembers a bulky, heavy and uncomfortable cast wrapped around their skin for weeks or months. Even today’s fiberglass casts can be itchy, trap odors and are difficult to keep clean and dry.

Those days may soon be over, thanks to new technology created by ActivArmor, of Colorado, that creates a removable, waterproof and durable 3-dimensional plastic cast. The casts have been employed at St. Luke’s Orthopedic Care for more than a year.

This month, St. Luke’s became the first in the nation to use its in-house 3D Print and Innovation Lab to produce ActivArmor casts for upper extremity injuries. The casts are typically covered by medical insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid.

Dustin Greenhill, MD, pediatric orthopedic surgeon at St. Luke’s Orthopedic Care, has been instrumental in deploying this new technology. “For an active child and their parents, weeks in a cast can feel like months,” he said. “I want them out of a traditional cast as soon as possible, but also need to protect the arm when kids go back to being kids. This cast lets me do both.”

With this technology, Greenhill said, “we can now get these 3D casts on kids fast – both for stable fractures that simply need to heal and, more recently, unstable injuries. For pre-adolescents and adolescents with a severe wrist or forearm fracture, I’m now doing their 3D scan during surgery.”

ActivArmor founder and CEO Diana Hall said that her company is “excited to work with some of the top innovators in orthopedics at St. Luke’s to bring this next-generation technology to market. St. Luke’s reputation for quality, service and patient satisfaction align perfectly with our mission at ActivArmor: to improve the safety and quality of life for those requiring immobilization while healing.”

The capacity to produce the casts in-house adds an additional layer of convenience. “Instead of having to wait a week for a custom cast to be made and shipped, we can literally have it in hours,” Honnick-Payne said. “We are starting to scan certain (surgical) patients for it in the operating room, before surgery, and have it ready for them when they need it. It is just so much more convenient for the patients and their parents.”

Jessica Kamensky, the service line administrator for Musculoskeletal Services at St. Luke’s, says the patients who are able to experience injury recovery using the ActivArmor casts appreciate its flexibility. “We found that the younger population, especially, gravitate to them. The device can start fastened and then transition to something that is more like a brace that can be easily removed. Kids can play with it on, bathe with it on…..it’s just so much more practical than a traditional cast.”

The idea

The idea behind the next-generation casts came to Hall, a former chemical engineer who spent her early career working in software engineering for Fortune 500 companies, through her work with impoverished children. After her daughter was born, she started a mentoring program for children in Pueblo, Colorado, and was shocked to see how much of a struggle it was for some children to maintain personal hygiene while wearing traditional casts.

Hall designed an alternative, created a few prototypes on her 3D printer and shared them with medical professionals. To her delight, the doctors not only approved of the alternative, but asked for more. Soon she was working directly with the Food and Drug Administration to navigate regulatory requirements. To make the cast, a 3D scan is made of the affected appendage and the image would be sent to ActivArmor using proprietary software. Now, the St. Luke’s 3D Print and Innovation Lab will have the capacity to create two, “clamshell-like” halves of the cast, which are then fitted onto the patient’s affected body part. It can be locked on like a cast or removed like a splint to allow swelling of an injured area to subside.

Hall said that the benefits even extend to patients who require voluntary compliance to address issues such as carpal tunnel syndrome. “With a more comfortable cast, we’re finding patients are using it more frequently, reducing the need for pain medications and allowing for advanced healing technologies, such as muscle stimulation. It’s improving healing outcomes for patients quickly and affordably, and giving people their lifestyle freedoms back.”