Affordable, vibrating glove may help patients regain motor control
Students develop low-cost prototype to ‘retrain’ brain
Two undergraduate students from Rice University in Houston have designed an affordable, vibrating glove that they say lets patients feel vibrations in their fingertips to retrain misfiring neurons (nerve cells) in the brain — a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease — and help them regain motor control.
The work by students Emmie Casey and Tomi Kuye, supported by Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), builds on a small Stanford University study that found coordinated, vibratory stimuli delivered daily to the fingertips improved patients’ motor performance.
“We wanted to take this breakthrough and make it accessible to people who would never be able to afford an expensive medical device,” Casey said in a university news story. “We set out to design a glove that delivers the same therapeutic vibrations but at a fraction of the cost.”
Parkinson’s is caused by the loss of neurons in the brain that produce dopamine, a chemical that is essential for nerve cell communication and motor control. When dopamine levels drop, patients may experience tremors, stiffness, slowed movements, and problems with balance and walking. These Parkinson’s symptoms are partly due to abnormal, overly synchronized firing patterns in motor-related brain circuits.
Earlier work at Stanford University found that wearing a glove that vibrates between 100 and 300 times per second, for about two hours twice a day, can help break up that synchronization and ease symptoms.
‘Not just masking symptoms’
Casey and Kuye worked up a lower-cost prototype, and they said the first reactions have been positive. One early version, made for a friend’s mother who has early-onset Parkinson’s, showed some surprising results. “After about six months of wearing the gloves regularly, she was able to walk unaided,” Casey said.
Their prototype uses the vibration motors found in wearables and smartphones, instead of the expensive ones used in other designs. Each fingertip of a soft, wireless glove has its own vibration motor, all powered by a custom circuit board placed on the wrist.
“This glove is designed to stimulate the Pacinian corpuscles within the fingertips to help resynchronize the neurons within the brain that cause tremors and stiffness,” Kuye said. A Pacinian corpuscle is a nerve ending that can sense pressure and vibration.
“We’re not just masking symptoms. We’re aiming to actually retrain this part of the brain,” said Kuye.
While the students are “not claiming it’s a cure,” Kuye said, “if it can give people just a little more control, a little more freedom, that’s life changing.”
Casey and Kuye are developing a commercial version of the glove that will sell for about $250, and have started a nonprofit to use sliding-scale pricing based on what patients can afford. They’re taking preorders and accepting donations to help get the first 500 pairs out by this fall.
The students also shared free instructions online so anyone can build their own gloves. While soldering, 3D printing, and light sewing are recommended, the instructions note that the soldering joints are simple, the 3D printed parts can be ordered, and a stapler or fashion tape can be used instead of sewing.
Meanwhile, Casey and Kuye are working on getting approval to test usability — that is, how well the gloves fit for use — and they’re planning to team up with people at the Texas Medical Center in Houston to test how effective the gloves are with patients.
“This project exemplifies what we strive for at the OEDK — empowering students to translate cutting-edge research into real-world solutions,” said Maria Oden, PhD, a professor of bioengineering and director of the OEDK, who supervised the work along with Heather Bisesti, an engineering design professor at Rice.
Oden, who is also co-director of the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health Technologies, said the students “have shown extraordinary initiative and empathy in developing a device that could bring meaningful relief to people living with Parkinson’s, no matter their resources.”
About the Author
