Oregon Intel employee helps boy with 3D-printed prosthetic

(JANUARY 18, 2021) Henry Hunker was born eight years ago with an underdeveloped hand. Modern limb prosthetics can cost upwards of $100,000, but thanks to 3-D Samaritans, Henry now has a hand that costs less than $10 -- and other kids think it looks pretty cool, too.

E-Nable, a volunteer group of over 1,500 members working on mechanical hand assistive devices with 3-D printers, helped give Henry his new plastic hand in 2014. Henry’s parents, Philip and Laura Hunker, sought the help of E-Nable and were connected with a volunteer local to them in the Portland, Oregon, area. That person was Wayne Waterman, who by day was working as a network engineer at Intel.

“I coined a phrase – I think I coined it – ‘3-D Samaritanism’,” Waterman said. “I have a 3-D printer. It costs me less than $10 to give somebody a prosthetic hand. And if you can do that sort of thing, you really should.”

Henry’s will be the fifth hand that Waterman has printed for someone in need, but the design still has room for improvements.

“Henry’s going to be a really interesting case because the technology is moving so fast… He’s only 2 years old now and the amount that he is going to grow is going to be kind of analogue with how fast the technology is going to grow,” Waterman said in 2014. “And as he grows, because they live in Portland, I’m going to be able to make the next iterations, as he gets bigger.”

And that's exactly what has happened over the years. Henry is now 8 years old. He's bigger -- and he's now in school where bullies have sometimes teased Henry about his missing limb. But things changed in third grade. Henry came up with a design to resemble a dragon, and Waterman turned it into reality.

“When I made Henry his first hand, it was because he was missing a hand,” said Waterman, now a webcast infrastructure architect in Intel’s Information Technology Group in Hillsboro. “When I made him the second hand, it was because it gave him some street cred at school.”