Shots are fired, soldiers duck for cover, fighter jets fly overhead, the enemy retreats and Spielberg bellows to indicate the end of the take. As actors and runners ready for the next scene, the bodies strewn on the battleground remain lifeless
More than 20 years after Saving Private Ryan earned Spielberg his second ‘Best Director’ Academy Award, the company behind the lifelike models imitating the many fallen soldiers during World War Two was supplying its products for a different kind of fight and one playing out in real-time. It would deploy 3D scanning and 3D printing technology to do so.
A few weeks before the UK entered its first nation-wide lockdown, Lifecast Body Sim donated five manikins to NHS Nightingale Hospitals in England and Wales to support the health service with its COVID-19 response and training. The company had been working with the medical industry for a number of years, with a team of clinicians helping to provide manikins that are realistic enough to teach doctors, but suddenly the demand for training equipment was more urgent. Thousands were in Intensive Care Units at the peak of the first wave, thousands more potentially just weeks away from the same predicament, and Lifecast’s models were being used to practice CPR techniques to help patients breathe.
“For COVID-19 training, the bodies have real pulses and lung functions that can help medical personnel practice putting patients on a ventilator, taking their pulse, and giving CPR in a lifelike way,” explains John Schoonraad, Lifecast Body Sim’s co-founder and Creative Director. “Each function of the manikins has gone through rigorous R&D. We needed to be certain that our lung volumes and pressures would replicate those of a real person when attached to a ventilator. We also made bodies with a realistic chest recoil which allowed us to teach prone CPR (face down CPR). This was vital as many COVID patients responded much better when their lungs were lower.”
Schoonraad says that cosmetically, manikins used in the film and medical sectors are the same, though they have different functions. For film dummies, it is sometimes important that they can breathe and have pulses, while medical ones, which need to be durable enough to be used daily, can also be intubated, catheterised and have a collapsed lung re-inflated.
The company has achieved this by combining traditional casting and moulding techniques with 3D technologies. An Artec Eva 3D scanner is used to capture natural expressions and positions of the human body in a process that takes just a few minutes, the data is processed in the Artec Studio software and then 3D printed. Lifecast Body Sim then refines those prints and uses them to produce a mould with malleable clay, high in plasticity and unique in its elasticity, to add finer details, before creating the dummies with silicon. Hair, eyebrows and eyelashes are added later, while the company has also managed to create functioning ‘lungs’ with differing breathing capacities based on age.
Commenting on the use of 3D technologies, Schoonraad says: “When we’re developing a new product, we need new specs. While there are lots of development overlaps, we’ll still need to get new scans of people for the dummy. Using 3D scanning saves us loads of time, whether it be for medical or movie applications. The scanning can be done anywhere so it’s definitely the way to go for these applications.”
Since March, more than 20,000 medical professionals in the UK have been trained for COVID-19 procedures using Lifecast Body Sim’s manikins, while the company is working on creating new dummies, such as pregnant women and premature babies, to allow nurses to practice on a variety of different patients. It is all to ensure that the company is prepared for any eventuality, especially as COVID-19 cases rise through the winter.
“Things are always in a state of flux, but we are prepared,” Schoonraad, finishes. “We don’t sell any COVID dummies, we donate them, and we’re ready to help as needed should the situation worsen. From a tiny human embryo to an 85-year-old woman, we’re creating new manikins to serve different purposes every day. We’re always in R&D and thinking of new ways to help train medical professionals. We’re just scratching the surface.”
