After making bionic arm, UCF students flooded with requests for help


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They were strangers, desperate for hope in far-flung places, as they wrote about surviving mutilation or dealing with birth defects.

The stories of pain and heartache flooded the college students' emails.

It was an overwhelming response for the group from the University of Central Florida that created an arm from a 3-D printer for a little boy born without a real one.

More than 100 emails and phone calls seeking help filtered in from across the world from Pakistan to Brazil after the UCF students' work appeared on NBC's "Today" show, BBC World News and the Orlando Sentinel in July.

"I didn't know there was this much need when we started working in the summer until the need started showing up in my inbox," said Albert Manero, a UCF mechanical-engineering doctorate student who grew up in Clearwater. "It started as soon as the stories went live."

Now, Manero and his UCF team have connected with other engineers and designers to grow their work. The UCF students are sharing what they've learned with groups at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California, for instance, so they can help more families, Manero said.

Those groups are building two arms for children in the United States, while another limb is being developed for someone in Prague, Czech Republic, Manero said, adding that a more basic prototype was also developed in Colombia.

Their project began when they created the bionic arm using a 3-D printer on campus for then-6-year-old Alex Pring of Groveland.

After building the device for Alex, the UCF team found another child

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