--- title: "Solving sleep disorders with scalable 3D printing" url: https://www.voxelmatters.com/solving-sleep-disorders-scalable-3d-printing/ date: 2026-02-23 modified: 2026-02-23 lang: en author: "Tess Boissonneault" description: "Sleep disorders like sleep apnoea are estimated to effect the lives of one billion people globally and can have a significant impact on a person's mental and physical health if..." categories: - "Case Studies" - "Dental AM" - "Medical AM" tags: - "top news" image: https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/eos-3dsleep-1-640x480.jpeg word_count: 717 --- # Solving sleep disorders with scalable 3D printing Sleep disorders like sleep apnoea are estimated to effect the lives of one billion people globally and can have a significant impact on a person's mental and physical health if left untreated. The need for scalable, easily deployable treatment solutions is therefore vital. Australian dental sleep medicine company 3D Sleep has developed a digital workflow that is up to the task as it can deliver custom mandibular advancement splints (MAS) at scale. Founded by a team of dentists and dental lab specialists, 3D Sleep saw clear hurdles to treating breathing-related sleep disorders like snoring, sleep apnoea, and bruxism using traditional methods. For one, oral devices like MAS have traditionally been produced manually, resulting in a slow and inconsistent process reliant in large part on the skill of individual technicians. "With traditional acrylic methods, even a really good technician could only make three or four appliances a day," said Dr. Ken Lee, Co-Director at 3D Sleep. "It was a small-scale process heavily dependent on individual skill, which limited our ability to grow before adopting additive manufacturing." Moreover, these conventional MAS devices were made from acrylic, a brittle plastic that is prone to fracture when too thin. This led to devices that were either too thick for patient comfort or were at risk of fracturing when worn. According to 3D Sleep, patients would often experience MAS fractures within three years and significant resources were spent replacing or fixing the broken devices. On top of that, the workflow associated with making (or replacing) MAS devices the old-fashioned way involved multiple steps, including taking physical molds of the patient's mouth, shipping the molds, waiting for models to harden, and the manual forming of the MAS using acrylic powders and liquids. With the rise of digital dentistry solutions, the answer to all these challenges seemed clear to 3D Sleep, which has since built a reliable and efficient workflow that involves intraoral scanning, CAD design, biocompatible nylon, and [EOS 3D printing](https://www.3dprintingbusiness.directory/company/eos/). This has done away with the need for physical molds and has converted a once highly technical, manual process into an automated and reliable one. [![3D Sleep Solving sleep disorders with scalable 3D printing](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/eos-3dsleep-2.jpeg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/eos-3dsleep-2.jpeg) According to 3D Sleep, minor manual adjustments are still made in the post-processing stage, when the 3D printed device is fitted onto a 3D printed model of the patient's teeth, but these are increasingly minimal as EOS' high-precision FORMIGA P 110 has been fine tuned for accuracy and repeatability. "When we decided to move to 3D printing, EOS stood out as the most well-known and reliable provider, offering the high accuracy and part reproducibility essential for producing consistent, high-quality medical devices," added Dr. Lee. The benefits of creating this digital workflow have been enormous. For one, it has unlocked unprecedented productivity and scalability. Whereas a single technician could only made three to four MAS appliances a day, the 3D printing-driven process can produce far more and with greater precision. The digital workflow is also well suited to producing new devices on-demand when a replacement is needed, thanks to easy-to-store digital files. Incidentally, replacements are actually less needed now: by leveraging nylon as the printing material, the occurrence of fractures has gone down significantly (>99%) compared to acrylic appliances. The combination of 3D printing and nylon has also unlocked thinner breathing aids, from 2–3 mm with acrylic to just 0.5–1 mm, which has improved patient fit and comfort. Overall, 3D Sleep has effectively solved all the key challenges it faced when using manual fabrication methods by building a digital workflow. "Compared to the very labor-intensive and messy process of creating appliances by hand, our EOS-based production is a much cleaner, more efficient digital operation," added Dr. Sam Talpis, Co-Director at 3D Sleep. The scalability of the company's process has not only enabled it to distribute sleep disorder devices to more people, it is also paving the way to global growth, with a particular focus on markets in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore. 3D Sleep is not the only company that has realized the advantages of using 3D printing for sleep disorder devices: last year, Airway Management, a developer of oral appliances, [received FDA clearance](https://www.voxelmatters.com/3d-printed-sleep-apnea-device-receives-fda-clearance/) for Nylon flexTAP, a printed single-point midline oral appliance for sleep apnoea. Glidewell, a California-based dental lab also rolled out a [3D printed MAS device](https://www.voxelmatters.com/glidewell-launches-silent-nite-3d-sleep-appliance/) in 2024 called Silent Nite 3D Sleep Appliance.