During med school, Faii Ong met a 103-year-old patient covered in soup, and asked the nurses why they weren’t helping her. “There’s nothing we can do,” they responded. The medications for Parkinson’s disease, from which the patient suffered, don’t work forever, the nurses explained, and beyond a certain point they don’t help much at all.
So Ong went to work. In less than two years, he and a “crack team of engineers, designers, and medics” have gone on to win the first inaugural £10,000 F-factor prize and produce the GyroGlove: a wearable device designed to mitigate the hand tremors suffered by Parkinson’s patients.
The GyroGlove is a cordless thin-and-light wearable 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—it’s an effector. And it has to move “silently and reliably at thousands of [revolutions per minute].” With a motion disorder like Parkinson’s, the impedance of a person’s normal movements is a major detractor from quality of life. That’s why the device has to be so light, and why the gyroscope has to rotate so fast: It must be responsive in real time to the wearer’s moving hands, without encumbering movement and thus making the solution more onerous than the problem.
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