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 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 local reports, Knapp came across a design from "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 reporting 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 initial news reports do not name the specific model Knapp built, so what follows is an inference based on available public data rather than 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 stands as the most probable match.
With that caveat in place, what is publicly known about the TMT reveals a fully 3D-printable mobility device for children roughly ages one to eight, built by MakeGood in collaboration with the industrial design firm LINK PBC and the nonprofit TOM Global. Nearly every part, including the frame, wheels, tires, seat, and even the straps, is printed on a consumer-grade machine, optimized for hardware like the Bambu Lab A1. The pieces snap together without tools, screws, or glue in a jigsaw-style assembly. If something breaks, an operator can simply reprint that single piece instead of replacing the entire chair.
MakeGood has released the TMT as a free, open-source design 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 the organization’s public disclosures, it has delivered over 3,000 free assistive devices of various kinds since its founding in 2021.
The Real Story: Cost and Accessibility
This is where the project stops being a feel-good local news segment and starts becoming a genuine accessibility story.
A traditional pediatric wheelchair in the United States typically costs between $1,200 and $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. That baseline cost arrives 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, with industry breakdowns itemizing the requirement as roughly eight to ten spools of PETG filament, two to three spools of TPU, and a small amount of hardware consisting of six bolts, two nuts, two washers, and casters. While that exact $150 figure applies to the TMT specifically—and cannot be independently verified as the exact cost of the wheelchair Knapp built at Monroe Carell—WTVF reports Knapp’s own estimate that his hospital chair came out to roughly ten times cheaper than a typical wheelchair. That figure lines up closely with what a $150 TMT-style build would cost relative to a commercial chair.
The reason the savings are so dramatic isn’t just cheaper materials; it is 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, allowing the design to exist as a digital file while the production happens on a printer sitting in a hospital office, school library, or spare room.
Why This Matters Even More Globally
The Nashville story highlights a single hospital with one printer and one motivated employee. However, the underlying technology carries implications that extend 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 remains stark. A global report on assistive technology issued jointly by the World Health Organization and UNICEF 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 dropping as low as three percent of need in poorer nations, compared to roughly 90 percent in wealthy countries.
Separately, peer-reviewed research on wheelchair service provision, citing WHO population estimates, places the number of people who need a wheelchair worldwide at roughly 77 million, of whom only an estimated 17 to 37 percent have access to one in less-resourced settings. This leaves an estimated 33 to 65 million people who need a wheelchair without one. The World Health Organization’s broader World Report on Disability similarly notes that an estimated 80 percent of people with disabilities live in developing or low-resource countries—precisely the places where commercial wheelchair supply chains are thinnest and import costs are highest.
This is the exact gap that low-cost, open-source 3D-printed designs are positioned to close. Because the designs are digital and open-source, they bypass import tariffs, international shipping bottlenecks, and centralized manufacturing hurdles. Local technicians can download the files, adapt them to local material availability, and manufacture devices directly within the communities that need them most.
Why Hospitals and Institutions Should Pay Attention
The case for hospitals, schools, and disability-focused nonprofits to invest in this technology comes down to the core elements demonstrated by the Monroe Carell project: drastically reduced costs, rapid local production capabilities, and the potential to provide customized equipment that children can take home and keep as they grow.
None of this means 3D-printed devices are ready to fully replace clinically prescribed, insurance-covered wheelchairs for every patient. Factors such as durability, strict weight limits, and long-term clinical validation remain active areas of research and development.
Yet for the specific use case observed in Nashville—getting a functional, well-fitted mobility device into a young child’s hands quickly and cheaply—the technology is already working today. For other hospitals, schools, and global health institutions, the question is no longer whether this approach works, but rather when they will begin adopting it.
