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gyroglove-sketch

Quality of life is supremely important for people who accept diseases similar Parkinson's, which is a fatal genetic disorder that currently has no cure. During med school, Faii Ong met a 103-year-old Parkinson'southward patient covered in soup, and asked why the nurses weren't helping her. They responded, "in that location's nothing nosotros can practise." The medications for Parkinson's don't work forever, the nurses explained, and beyond a sure point they don't aid much at all, leaving little the nurses could aid with.

Galvanized into action, Ong went to work. Inside two years, he and a "crack squad of engineers, designers and medics" take gone on to win the first inaugural £10,000 F-factor prize and produce the GyroGlove: a wear device designed to mitigate the hand tremors suffered by Parkinson's patients.

Design-Sketch-GyroGlove-0201114-Benjamin-Koh

Diagram of the GyroGlove'south innards. Credit: GyroGear

The GyroGlove is a cordless sparse-and-light clothing hand stabilizer. It's powered by a battery, with a tiny integrated controller that drives a precession hinge and turntable, and a responsive gyroscope . The gyroscope isn't a detector — information technology's an effector. And it has to move "silently and reliably at thousands of RPM." With a motion disorder like Parkinson's, the impedance of a person'southward normal movements is a major detractor from quality of life. That'due south why the device has to exist so light, and why the gyroscope has to rotate and then fast: Information technology must be responsive in real time to the wearer'southward moving easily, without encumbering their movements and making the solution more onerous than the problem.

Gyroscope_operationThe way it works isn't rooted in technological bells and whistles, just instead in straight-upwards rotational kinematics: a new application of a well-established principle. "Mechanical gyroscopes are like spinning tops: they always try to stay upright by conserving angular momentum," Ong explains. "My thought was to use gyroscopes to instantaneously and proportionally resist a person's hand motion, thereby dampening any tremors in the wearer's hand." Testers report that using the device is like plunging a hand into thick syrup: motion is costless, and slower. Benchtop enquiry showed that the GyroGlove was capable of reducing manus tremors by 90%.

The GyroGlove uses a gyroscope not unlike the control moment gyroscope used on the International Infinite Station, the i that allows it to pivot in infinite without using fuel. It'southward simple, piece of cake to manufacture, and it tin be made very pocket-sized. This depression-overhead application is why the GyroGlove's power pack tin be so thin and light: it doesn't require a big battery to practice what it does.

While there are still some bugs to exist worked out apropos weight and noise, Ong's team is now in the process of getting the device manufactured; they expect the device will cost near $700 US when it's released, hopefully by the end of this yr.