After spending an entire summer on crutches after breaking his ankle while playing basketball, Partha Unnava decided to change his situation for the better. While on crutches, Unnava had experienced severe underarm pain and confirmed that other people he knew on crutches complained that they also experienced similar problems. Along with two fellow biomedical engineering students at Georgia Tech, Andrew Varghese and Frankie Swindell, Unnava decided to fix this problem.

In May 2013, the trio formed a company known as Better Walk for designing an improved crutch that eliminates force from the underarm area of the crutch user. In this way, the crutch reduces the amount of direct force through the wrist of the user. 3D printing has now been introduced into the concept of the Better Walk crutch. 3D printing has allowed the company to cut the time and funding required for the creation of prototypes, and has also helped them to begin testing and redesigning products at a much faster rate than traditional techniques.

The team behind Better Walk were able to create visual demonstrations of various changes and iterations suggested by physical therapists and orthopedic surgeons and then incorporated these suggestions to update their design for the improved crutch.

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Bill Besim