Case Study: Mass Customisation of Individualized Orthotics – The FASHION-ABLE Virtual Development and Production Framework

Until now, mass-customisation of (wearable) products has been seen as higher added value which had (and will have) to compete with ready to wear offers. However, there are fields of application for which customer specific product design, including benefits as optimized fit, is not just an added value but a fundamental need. This is due to the fact that off-the shelf products do not meet the morphological or problem specific diversity needed to assure the functionality of the products. Thus, individualized products are in a lot of cases not just an additional feature but a prerequisite for successful curing. The FASHION-ABLE virtual development and production framework is set up on digital development data of the future products as well as workflow specific data and information objects that are processed in dedicated process steps. Thus first of all the relevant information and data objects will be highlighted and described and in a second step aligned with the underlying workflow. The basic information for individualized production of orthotics is composed out of a customer specific 3D scan that is used to extract the relevant measures and the configuration of the orthotic. To enable automated adaption of pattern to customer measures, 2D CAD models that are enhanced with MtM rules are coexisting with 3D simulation ready CAD data, also enhanced with the same MtM rules to enable virtual proof of fit. These CAD data are provided in a modular way to ensure a lean variant-capable setup. Bringing these CAD data together with the customer specific configuration and the 3D scan then enables to simulate a virtual prototype as well as to generate an optimized customer specific marker.