Grassroots Maker Perspectives on Participation in Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology Development
Saquib Sarwar, David Wilson, Khairul Mahbub · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790477
Summary
Sarwar, Wilson, and Mahbub interviewed 20 grassroots DIY assistive-technology (DIY-AT) makers in the U.S. between July 2021 and December 2023 to build a maker-centered account of the DIY-AT ecosystem. Participants were recruited from social media (Reddit r/AssistiveTechnology, r/Prosthetics, r/disability, Facebook maker groups), online design platforms (Thingiverse, Printables), and volunteer organizations including e-NABLE, Makers Making Change, The Helping Hand Project, and Volksswitch. The sample deliberately crossed professional boundaries: mechanical and biomechanics engineers, software developers, STEM teachers, occupational therapists (school-based, service-provider, researcher, and professor), a political scientist, and a medical student — with seven participants disclosing disabilities including physical disability, autism, neurodivergence, and visual impairment. Makers produced a range of devices spanning upper-limb prosthetics, finger prosthetics, adaptive utensils, sewing adaptations, fidget toys, braille adaptive toys, adaptive pen grips, and daily-living aids. The authors conducted inductive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke, with the second and third authors documenting reflexive self-checks throughout, to theorize the sociocultural and structural conditions shaping DIY-AT work. Two research questions guide the paper: what the DIY-AT ecosystem looks like from the maker's perspective, and what role makers play in democratizing assistive technology. Outputs include a development-pipeline taxonomy and a stakeholder ecosystem model grounded in Heggins et al.'s interdependence framework.
Key findings
DIY-AT development follows a five-stage pipeline — connecting with recipients, understanding assistive needs, gathering design resources, making and testing, and managing expenses — with workflows diverging sharply between on-site makers (who measure directly and iterate in real time) and remote makers (who depend on photos, video calls, Amazon product links, 3D scans, and paper wraps to capture body dimensions). Makers with personal or family disability experience consistently reported the strongest relationships with recipients and fastest iteration. Major challenges include: custom anatomy ('every amputation, every type of finger loss is a little bit different'); tension between flexible and rigid 3D-printing materials, especially for orthoses; food-safety and disinfection concerns with 3D-printed utensils; unreliable parent/caregiver feedback (prostheses abandoned without explanation); inaccessible makerspaces for disabled makers themselves; steep learning curves for CAD tools like Fusion 360 and OpenSCAD; and resistance from medical institutions that view 3D-printed ATs as a liability. Best practices that emerged: rapid prototyping to 'close the loop,' modular designs using rubber bands and Velcro for easy caregiver repair, parametric open-source models (especially via OpenSCAD) so recipients can customize without CAD expertise, and curated personal AT libraries vetted against unreliable community repositories. The paper synthesizes a three-stakeholder ecosystem model — Volunteer Maker Organizations, AT Recipients, and DIY-AT Makers — connected by open-source AT repositories, with explicit role descriptions showing how recipients move between stakeholder groups over time (e.g., an AT recipient becoming an e-NABLE maker).
Relevance
This is a practical field guide for anyone designing programs, platforms, or tools that touch DIY assistive technology. For platform designers, it identifies concrete gaps: lack of curated/vetted AT repositories, inconsistent online design quality, and missing workflows for remote measurement. For medical and OT institutions, the paper documents specific administrative barriers (liability concerns, pricing, equipment maintenance) that block interested clinicians from contributing. For accessibility practitioners, the interdependence-based ecosystem model is a useful framing for evaluating whether a DIY-AT initiative sustains itself or collapses when one stakeholder drops out. The paper is especially useful for situating the role of volunteer organizations like e-NABLE and Makers Making Change alongside independent makers. Limitations include the U.S.-only sample, the 21-month recruitment window spanning pandemic-era constraints, and absence of structured demographic analysis (gender, age, region). Even so, it complements and extends prior work that focused on single organizations (often e-NABLE) or single device types.
Tags: DIY assistive technology · assistive technology · 3D printing · digital fabrication · makerspace · maker culture · occupational therapy · democratization · prosthetics · interdependence · qualitative research · open source