An interview with Tom van de Water

First project

“The Mano Air was my first project. An iconic product, it almost looks like a work of art and is fully 3D printed. It was also a unique brace in the orthopaedic world, especially because it has no straps and wraps completely around your hand. However, it just didn’t fit very well. They often came back from patients who had sore spots on their hands. My goal was to solve these comfort problems.”

Kick off

“The first step was to talk to our team of orthopaedic technologists: why do we keep getting this brace back, where exactly does it hurt, what other aspects of the brace could be improved? Because we do a lot of patient evaluations, we have all that data. For example, the original brace didn’t have a strap because many patients didn’t want one. But to stay in place it has to grip your hand, which puts pressure on the hard areas where the bones are. I first looked to see if I could remedy that by using padding or foam or by making things softer. I customised it to my own hand to experience how the original model and prototypes felt, but I found that even with all those design adjustments, the comfort did not improve.”

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Client research

“I then called fifteen patients to ask if they would like to participate in a study. We learned a lot about how we could improve the brace. Next, you have to make sure that the new design can be produced. This is where most of the work lies: devising the design rules that ensure the brace fits well and comfortably on all different hands. I spent quite a long time on this together with the orthopaedic technologists, the 3D design team and the production team.”

Anatomy

“Then I started to look more closely at the anatomy of the hand. Which parts are very sensitive? You can have quite a bit of pressure on the softer parts of the hand, but not on the harder parts of the bones and tendons. That’s when the brace becomes uncomfortable. A strap ensures that the brace no longer ends up on the harder parts of the hand and that you can make the brace thinner and therefore half as heavy. Patients notice this. In addition, there are patients whose hands sometimes retain some moisture, and with a strap you can adjust the brace a little. From a comfort perspective, a strap is not a bad choice at all.”

Result

“The wearing comfort of this new brace is so good that we hardly ever get any back due to fitting issues. It is also increasingly popular, now being chosen four times as often as the original brace. This is also because it is less conspicuous than the silicone version, which is unrivalled in terms of comfort. Many people also choose the Mano Air in their skin colour, because they don’t want to show too much that they have something wrong with their hand.”

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Strap

“A recurring point of criticism was the strap. Patients really didn’t like that. We are now working on a soft woven strap, similar to an Apple Watch strap. These straps are now being tested for durability: does the Velcro still work properly and how hard-wearing is the fabric? Once we are satisfied with all of that, we will test the straps on our patients, because we don’t take any chances here. It may seem like a small job, but developing a nice strap is also a lot of work. And then we move on to the next thing, because a product is never finished. We always continue to develop and improve.”

Impact

Tom van de Water is a senior design engineer at Manometric and has had a son with his girlfriend for just under six months. “The first appointment was made by a doctor who had a Mano Air on both hands. I was of course very surprised and asked her what she thought of the brace. She said: normally I only wore a brace at night because it wasn’t practical during the day, but I can wear this one all day. Then you know that as a designer you have really made something good.”