If you have heard anything about Parkinson’s disease, you know that one of the things that it affects is your muscles, making people who suffer from it experience involuntary tremors. This can be extremely difficult to live with since feeding yourself, changing yourself, doing simple things like going to the bathroom can be a chore.Now there are various gadgets and medicine out there that will help mitigate some of the symptoms, and the GyroGlove is one of them, and one of the more promising sounding ones too. Developed by medical student Faii Ong who at one point was tasked to care for a patient suffering from Parkinson’s, he decided to himself that there had to be a better way.
The end result was the GyroGlove. According to Ong, “Mechanical gyroscopes are like spinning tops: they always try to stay upright by conserving angular momentum. My idea was to use gyroscopes to instantaneously and proportionally resist a person’s hand movement, thereby dampening any tremors in the wearer’s hand.”
So far it seems that the prototype has been met with great success. In tests, the team behind the glove reported that it reduced tremors by as much as 90%, although admittedly there is still a lot of work left to be done, such as refinements to its size as well as dealing with the noise it emits. Ong and his team are hoping that they will be able to launch the glove in the UK by September this year, and expect it to be priced between £400 to £600.
Filed in . Read more about Wearable Tech.