Lineage Patterns in Online 3D Prosthetic Design Repositories

Most 3D printing designs are inspired by existing designs. This is specially true for prosthetic designs. Designers try to improvise on previous designs. However, they often fail to credit sources, thus making it difficult to track the design changes. This problem can be solved by finding lineage patterns in the 3D printing design repositories and visualizing them. Thingiverse is an online 3D printing repository. In this project, we collected the data from Thingiverse and created an interactive visualization. We also created an algorithm using the Levenshtein distance and the Gale-Shapely algorithms to compare 3D printing design files and generate lineage relations between the designs.