How We’ll 3D-Print The Internet Of Things

The Internet of Things promises that every object will eventualy be hooked up to a network. And 3D printing promises that any object we can imagine, we can build—on site and on demand. And big data promises we’ll know everything there is to know about these networked objects.

What happens when you put those innovations together? For starters, reach up to the left side of your chest and consider what lies beneath.

Your Heart, Connected

The human heart is a powerful yet delicate thing. While song and story may have every heart breaking the same way, the organ actually varies from individual to individual.

Those variations in the human body have presented which the healthcare sector has contended with since, well, forever. From fashioning splints from tree branches to working with stents that open up clogged arteries in the heart, doctors and technicians have had to work to make worldly things fit as well as possible within the body.

Very soon, however, the day will come when a patient in need of a custom medical device, such as a prosthesis or stent, can have such an object manufactured within minutes right at the healthcare facility, instead of waiting for days to get the device delivered from a factory.

3D-printed medical devices could save time and money. Yet we’re missing some of the benefit if that device just gets implanted in your body and forgotten. To be part of the Internet of Things, it must somehow be scannable, so its state can get entered into a database somewhere; and those pieces of information then need to become part of the large-scale, crunchable data sets known as Big Data.

All three of these elements are pretty much present already: real-time data-analysis software that can measure and crunch the specifications for devices in minutes as opposed to days; components that can be built with unique identifiers to ensure exact assembly; and 3D printers can churn out devices on-premise on an as-needed basis.

Ideally, we’d have a circulatory system of data not unlike the veins and arteries that connect our heart: Data about our bodies would flow into 3D printers, to create just the right device at the right time; trackers would confirm that the right device is going into our body; diagnostic systems would report on its performance and warn of failures; and analytics would tell manufacturers, doctors, regulators, and researchers how a broad range of the devices perform over time.

Healthcare is not the only sector that will benefit from the maturation of these technologies: Indeed, any business with a supply chain, no matter what’s getting made and transported, could be up-ended by this confluence.

Making The Connection

It’s easy to understand the connection between Big Data and the Internet of Things: Anything connected to a network spews data, and something must collect and analyze that data.

The connection between 3D printing isn’t as clear—until you realize that 3D-printed objects, which are the physical instantiation of a design expressed in data, were born to be networked objects.

This doesn’t mean they must have a persistent Internet connection like a smartphone or tablet—but at the very least, they must have some way of signaling what they are.