The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that over 600,000 visits to the emergency room each year in the US are due to sports-related dental injuries, which just makes me cringe…the only potential I ever had for a (semi)sports-related dental injury was if I marched into someone on the field during band and accidentally jammed my flute into my mouth. More than one-quarter of all total dental injuries are sports-related, with basketball, boxing, hockey, and martial arts representing some of the highest-risk activities.
But luckily, as we’ve seen time and again, many serious sports injuries can potentially be prevented by using 3D printing to fabricate protective equipment, such as mouthguards.
Global science-based company Royal DSM, which is headquartered in the Netherlands and is active in health, materials, and nutrition, takes 3D printing pretty seriously. The company has now announced a new partnership with Dutch sports initiative 3Dmouthguard, located in Eindhoven, with a technical launch yesterday.
3Dmouthguard believes that athletes can better focus on their performance if they have access to custom, sustainable protective gear, which is why it digitizes and automates the full process of making custom mouthguards, in cooperation with its partners Carestream Dental, Dentalair, NHL Stenden Hogeschool, and now DSM and Mass Portal.
Read more: DSM Helping Dutch Sports Initiative 3D Print Custom Sports Mouthguards On the Spot
thumbnail courtesy of 3dprint.com
