3D Printed IV Injection Trainer for Medical Students’ Practice

It takes a lot of dedication and hard work in order to successfully become a doctor. Doctors are very competitive and devoted in everything that they do. Throughout their stay in the medical school, they always experience a lot of firsts just like inserting a needle, which is considered to be one of the most intimidating things to do. For sure, there are doctors who get nervous whenever they do it, while some are also excited to try. Of course, doctors would need a lot of practice to do it successfully. This means that it is necessary to have a patient, but who is it going to be? A real human body must be the training device, and your medical student friend might be tired of constantly offering his arm for your practice.

With the help of technology, specifically 3D printing, there have been great ideas for training that is very useful for medical students, such as the 3D printed skins and other advanced medical simulators and models used by surgeons when performing complex procedures like neurosurgery. A new company aims to make it more realistic for medical students during practice.

Using a 3D printer together with multi-colored silicone and the special FAM technology, Stanford University alumni and the San Draw Medical‘s founders Michael Lu and Gary Chang was able to create the IV Injection Trainer. The material produced makes it possible for students to insert the needle into a real arm. This trainer includes a replaceable skin pad, which can be used for about 100 punctures.

Right after its release, the IV Injection Trainer has become very popular because it definitely looks and feels like the real skin. In fact, when it is pressed, it offers a similar response to that of the real human skin. These training devices are affordable as well, and offer self-sustainability because medical students can work on them anytime and anywhere they want. Another great thing about having a trainer like this is that you can fully customize it – changing the diameter of the vein, the rigidity of the skin and the depth of the vein. By customizing the training device, medical students will not only be used to one specific condition. As a doctor, being versatile is very important because every patient that they encounter is also unique.

Aside from the trainer itself, a kit is also included, which contains everything that a medical student needs during practice such as the rubber tourniquet, as well as the hand that accompanies the arm. You can directly buy it online from San Draw Medical at $399 only, which already includes one pad. If you wish to add more replacements, you can buy them only at $99 each.

This is just the start of the inventions made by the company because they are also involved in making some other different medical tools such as line of surgery simulators, 3D printed suture pads and IV torso. Furthermore, San Draw Medical also features the first 3D printing services for silicone.