Assistive Utensil for Tremor Patients
What:
This was my undergraduate capstone project. My team chose to create an assistive device for tremor patients.
I was the team's technical lead and was responsible for developing and validating all the mathematical models.
Why:
Essential tremors is a neurological condition affecting more than 10 million Americans. It disrupts daily life by making simple tasks like eating and drinking difficult. It also cause social anxiety about eating and drinking in public settings due to fear of judgement.
Current solutions are either expensive, bulky, or heavy making them inaccessible or inconvenient to use. We wanted to create a more accessible solution as an alternative to fill this gap.
How:
We created a passive vibration damping system using piezoelectric discs that may be tuned to target specific frequencies. This allows the device to be personalized to a person's needs, and may be adjusted as the nature of the tremor changes with age.
The vibration damper results in up to 50% reduction in tremor magnitudes. It's also affordable at $40 in material costs which is 20% of the Liftware Steady (current market leader).
Initial Design and Testing
After many iterations, we settled on a design that we felt like could work. The idea is that the mechanical energy of vibrations get converted into electrical energy by the piezoelectric discs. This gets dissipated as heat which results in reduced tremors.
We tested this idea on a shaker bed tuned to typical tremor frequencies and measured the system response. We saw in our tests that the piezoelectric discs and resistors reduced the magnitudes of tremors. The addition of inductors helped to further dampen the tremors. This gave us confidence to move forward with the design.
Final Design and End-User Testing
After we finalized the design, the last step was to validate everything by testing with an end-user. We reached out to our project sponsor, who has tremors, to test the device. We measured the acceleration of the tip of the spoon for a regular metal spoon and our device. We found that the device helped to attenuate tremors!
