At Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital in Nashville, the newest piece of mobility equipment is a 3D printed wheelchair — built layer by layer by a gaming and technology specialist who had never set out to design a wheelchair at all.
That detail matters. It’s a small sign of a much bigger shift happening in pediatric care: hospitals, schools, and even individual families are starting to manufacture the assistive technology that the traditional medical supply chain has struggled to deliver — affordably, quickly, or in a way that feels like it was made for an actual child instead of a generic patient.
What’s Actually Happening at Monroe Carell
The story centers on Graden Knapp, whose day job is making hospital stays more bearable for kids through toys, video games, and other “fun tools.” While working at Monroe Carell, Knapp noticed something more fundamental than entertainment was missing: the hospital didn’t have enough wheelchairs suited to its young patients’ needs.
So he taught himself a new skill. According to the original WTVF/NewsChannel 5 report, Knapp came across “Made Good” — almost certainly MakeGood, a New Orleans-based disability design nonprofit, given the matching name and mission — and used a design the group provided to spend two to three months printing the components and assembling what is now the hospital’s first nearly-complete 3D printed wheelchair. The source article does not name the specific model Knapp built.
The plan isn’t just to park the chair in a hospital closet. Knapp’s intent is for patients to take the wheelchair home with them after discharge — turning a piece of hospital equipment into something a child keeps, customizes, and grows into.
It’s a small, almost grassroots project. But it points to where pediatric assistive technology may be headed: produced on-site, tailored to the individual child, and built around the idea that a wheelchair can be both functional and something a kid is excited to use.
The Likely Design Behind the Wheelchair: MakeGood’s Toddler Mobility Trainer
A caveat up front: the WTVF article doesn’t name the specific model Knapp built, so what follows is our best inference, not a confirmed fact. MakeGood’s flagship — and, as far as public reporting shows, its only fully 3D printable wheelchair design — is the Toddler Mobility Trainer (TMT), which matches the article’s description closely enough (a printed children’s mobility device, sourced from a nonprofit of “charity engineers”) that it’s the most probable match. If you’re reading this as someone connected to the hospital or to Knapp directly, we’d genuinely like to know which design it was.
With that caveat in place, here’s what’s publicly known about the TMT. It’s a fully 3D printable mobility device for children roughly ages 1 to 8, built by MakeGood in collaboration with the industrial design firm LINK PBC and the nonprofit TOM Global, and announced via PRNewswire in December 2025. Nearly every part — frame, wheels, tires, seat, even the straps — is printed on a consumer-grade machine (the design is optimized for the Bambu Lab A1), and the pieces snap together without tools, screws, or glue, jigsaw-style. If something breaks, you reprint that one piece instead of replacing the whole chair.
MakeGood has released the TMT as a free, open-source design on MakerWorld, explicitly so that “anyone with a 3D printer and some filament” — a parent, a school librarian, a hospital technologist like Knapp — can produce one at home or in a classroom. According to MakeGood’s own December 2025 press release, the organization has delivered over 3,000 free assistive devices of various kinds since its founding in 2021.
The Real Story: Cost
This is where the project stops being a feel-good local news segment and starts being a genuine accessibility story.
A traditional pediatric wheelchair in the U.S. typically costs $1,200 to $5,000, and custom or powered pediatric models can run well past $12,000 once specialized seating, materials, and electronics are factored in, according to pricing breakdowns from medical equipment retailers Nurture Mobility and BetterCare. That’s before accounting for the fact that growing children outgrow wheelchairs every couple of years, multiplying the lifetime cost, and that insurance frequently denies or only partially covers these claims.
By contrast, MakeGood states that a complete Toddler Mobility Trainer can be produced for about $150 in materials — its own press release gives that exact figure, and a Bambu Lab breakdown itemizes it as roughly 8–10 spools of PETG filament, 2–3 spools of TPU, and a small amount of hardware (six bolts, two nuts, two washers, plus casters). That $150 figure is specifically what MakeGood reports for the TMT — we can’t confirm it’s the exact design or exact cost of the wheelchair Knapp built at Monroe Carell, since the source article doesn’t specify. What WTVF does report directly is Knapp’s own estimate that his hospital’s chair came out to roughly 10 times cheaper than a typical wheelchair — a figure that lines up closely with what a $150 TMT-style build would cost relative to a $1,200–$5,000 commercial chair, even if we can’t verify it’s an apples-to-apples comparison of the same exact device.
The reason the savings are so dramatic isn’t just cheaper materials — it’s the elimination of an entire layer of manufacturing, distribution, and retail markup that conventional durable medical equipment carries. A traditional wheelchair has to be designed once, tooled for mass production, manufactured in a factory, shipped, stocked by a supplier, and marked up at each step. A 3D printed version skips nearly all of that: the design exists as a digital file, and the “factory” is whatever printer happens to be sitting in a hospital office, a school library, or a family’s spare room.
How Accessible Is This, Really?
“Cheap” and “accessible” aren’t automatically the same thing, so it’s worth being specific about what’s actually required to make a chair like the TMT (again, the likely — but not confirmed — basis for Knapp’s build):
- The printer itself. MakeGood optimized the TMT for the Bambu Lab A1, a consumer-grade printer that costs several hundred dollars — a real but one-time and increasingly common purchase. Many schools, libraries, and makerspaces already own machines like it.
- Filament and basic hardware. PETG and TPU filament plus a handful of bolts and washers, available from any 3D printing supplier.
- No specialized tools. The TMT’s modular, snap-together design means assembly doesn’t require a workshop or formal engineering training. Separately, we do know from the WTVF article that Knapp himself had no prosthetics or engineering background and learned 3D printing specifically for this project — a real data point about accessibility, regardless of which design he used.
- No cost to the end user, for the TMT specifically. MakeGood distributes the TMT design for free and will also build and ship completed chairs to families who request them directly.
That combination — a low one-time equipment cost, cheap consumable materials, an open-source design, and no specialized expertise required — is what makes this fundamentally different from earlier eras of “DIY medical equipment.” It’s not just cheaper; it’s replicable by schools, hospitals, and individual families almost anywhere a printer and an internet connection exist.
Why This Matters Even More in the Global South
The Nashville story is a single hospital with one printer and one motivated employee. But the underlying technology has implications that go far beyond Tennessee — particularly for low- and middle-income countries, where access to mobility devices is dramatically worse than in wealthy nations.
The scale of the gap is stark. The WHO and UNICEF’s Global Report on Assistive Technology found that more than 2.5 billion people worldwide need at least one assistive product — wheelchairs, hearing aids, communication devices — yet nearly one billion of them are denied access, with an analysis of 35 countries showing access as low as 3% of need in poorer nations, compared to roughly 90% in wealthy countries. Separately, a peer-reviewed study on wheelchair service provision, citing WHO population estimates, puts the number of people who need a wheelchair worldwide at roughly 77 million, of whom only an estimated 17–37% have access to one in less-resourced settings — meaning an estimated 33–65 million people who need a wheelchair don’t have one. The World Health Organization’s earlier World Report on Disability similarly notes that an estimated 80% of people with disability live in developing or low-resource countries — exactly the places where commercial wheelchair supply chains are thinnest and import costs are highest.
This is precisely the gap that low-cost, open-source 3D printed designs are positioned to close, for a few concrete reasons:
- No import dependency. A wheelchair shipped from a manufacturer in the U.S. or Europe to a hospital in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia carries shipping costs, import duties, and long lead times. A digital file does not. Once a single printer and filament supply exist locally, devices can be produced on-site, on demand.
- Designs can be adapted locally. Because the TMT and similar projects are open-source, clinicians and engineers in any country can modify the files for local body sizes, available materials, or specific conditions — something a single mass-produced commercial product can’t offer.
- It matches the realities of decentralized care. Much of the assistive technology gap in lower-resource settings isn’t just about money — it’s about distance from specialized clinics and suppliers. A 3D printer in a regional hospital or school removes the need for a long supply chain entirely, similar to how digital, decentralized manufacturing is already being explored for prosthetics and orthotics in resource-limited settings more broadly.
- It builds local capacity, not just local supply. A hospital or school that owns a printer and the skills to run it doesn’t just receive one wheelchair — it gains a standing capability to produce assistive devices indefinitely, for as many patients as the need arises, without waiting on a fresh round of donated equipment or grant funding each time.
Why Hospitals and Institutions Should Pay Attention
The case for hospitals, schools, and disability-focused nonprofits to invest in this technology comes down to three things this article actually demonstrates:
- It’s dramatically cheaper per device, freeing up limited charity care and rehabilitation budgets to serve more patients rather than fewer.
- It doesn’t require specialized staff. Knapp wasn’t a biomedical engineer or prosthetist — he was a hospital tech specialist who found an open-source design and learned as he went. That’s a realistic bar for many institutions to clear, especially as 3D printing skills become more common in schools and libraries.
- It can be tailored to the patient, not just delivered as a cheaper version of the same generic product. Open-source 3D printable designs like the TMT are built to be customized for color, fit, and added features — a flexibility that’s harder to get from a single mass-produced commercial model.
None of this means 3D printed devices are ready to fully replace clinically prescribed, insurance-covered wheelchairs for every patient — durability, weight limits, and long-term clinical validation are still active areas of research. But for the specific use case shown at Monroe Carell — getting a functional, well-fitted mobility device into a young child’s hands quickly and cheaply — the technology is already working, today, in a hospital in Nashville. The question for other hospitals, schools, and global health institutions isn’t really whether this approach works. It’s whether they’re going to be the next ones to print one.
Sources: WTVF/NewsChannel 5 Nashville; MakeGood; MakeGood PRNewswire release, Dec. 2025; MakerWorld – 3D Toddler Mobility Trainer; Bambu Lab Blog; WHO/UNICEF Global Report on Assistive Technology; wheelchair access study, PMC; WHO World Report on Disability, via Physiopedia; wheelchair pricing data via Nurture Mobility and BetterCare.
Featured image source: Makegood.design