At the 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 is 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 is 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 that it is the most probable match. If you are reading this as someone connected to the hospital or to Knapp directly, we would genuinely like to know which design it was.
With that caveat in place, here is what is publicly known about the TMT. It is 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, including the frame, wheels, tires, seat, and even the straps, is printed on a consumer-grade machine 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—whether a parent, a school librarian, or a hospital technologist like Knapp—can produce one at home or in a classroom. According to MakeGood’s 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 is 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 to 10 spools of PETG filament, 2 to 3 spools of TPU, and a small amount of hardware, including six bolts, two nuts, two washers, plus casters. That $150 figure is specifically what MakeGood reports for the TMT. While we cannot confirm it is the exact design or exact cost of the wheelchair Knapp built at Monroe Carell since the source article does not specify, WTVF does report directly on Knapp’s own estimate that his hospital’s chair came out to roughly 10 times cheaper than a typical wheelchair. This figure lines up closely with what a $150 TMT-style build would cost relative to a commercial chair priced between $1,200 and $5,000, even if we cannot verify it is an apples-to-apples comparison of the exact same device.
The reason the savings are so dramatic is not just cheaper materials, but 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, as 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 are not automatically the same thing, so it is worth being specific about what is actually required to make a chair like the TMT. Beyond access to a reliable consumer 3D printer and basic printing filaments, users need minimal technical proficiency to download digital files, monitor prints, and assemble the snap-together components.
That combination of 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 is not just cheaper; it is 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 centers on a single hospital with one printer and one motivated employee. However, 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, such as wheelchairs, hearing aids, or communication devices, yet nearly one billion of them are denied access. An analysis of 35 countries showed access as low as 3 percent of need in poorer nations, compared to roughly 90 percent 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 those, only an estimated 17 to 37 percent have access to one in less-resourced settings, meaning between 33 million and 65 million people who need a wheelchair do not have one. The World Health Organization’s earlier World Report on Disability similarly notes that an estimated 80 percent of people with disabilities live in developing or low-resource countries, which are 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. Localized manufacturing avoids crippling import tariffs and international shipping logistics. Furthermore, digital distribution means an updated or customized design can be downloaded instantly anywhere with internet access, bypassing traditional supply chain bottlenecks entirely.
Why Hospitals and Institutions Should Pay Attention
The case for hospitals, schools, and disability-focused nonprofits to invest in this technology comes down to core advantages demonstrated by initiatives like the one in Nashville. On-site manufacturing drastically reduces financial barriers for families, while open-source customization allows equipment to be tailored precisely to a child’s immediate physical dimensions and personal preferences. Most importantly, it empowers local caregivers and technologists to provide immediate, tangible solutions rather than waiting months for insurance approvals and specialized medical shipments.
None of this means 3D-printed devices are ready to fully replace clinically prescribed, insurance-covered wheelchairs for every patient, as durability, weight limits, and long-term clinical validation remain 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 is not really whether this approach works, but whether they are going to be the next ones to print one.
