Generative Design for Spine Protection

To create the world’s first rotational spinal protector, the team at Edera Safety turned to machine learning for analyzing data and to generative design for exploring the greatest possibilities. Thomas Saier shares their story.

Roughly 500,000 people suffer spinal cord injuries every year, with many of these becoming paraplegics. Traditional spinal protectors prevent direct impact injuries to the spine, but rotational stress is responsible for five times more injuries. Thomas Saier and the team at Edera Safety set out to create a new kind of brace that would protect against these biomechanical effects. After spending four months using traditional intuitive design processes, yielding only 125 concepts, they turned to an automated approach. That started with measuring rotational stresses on a range of athletes—from skaters to mountain bikers to motocross riders. They then fed that data into Fusion 360 and used generative design to generate 190 new concepts in just 48 hours. The end result, the Rotational Spine Protection (RSP) System, is a brace that allows a natural range of motion while protecting against over-rotation.

About the speaker

Thomas Adam Saier is the founder of Edera Safety, makers of the “adamsfour” line of protective gear. He studied design and product management at the University of Applied Sciences in Austria and also teaches biomechanics and industrial design at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences.

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