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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 RPM.” 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 their movements and making the solution more onerous than the problem.

The way it works isn’t rooted in technological bells and whistles, but instead in straight-up 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 idea was to use gyroscopes to instantaneously and proportionally resist a person’s hand movement, 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 free, and slower. Benchtop research showed that the GyroGlove was capable of reducing hand tremors by 90%.

Perhaps inspired by the low-power requirements of GyroGlove uses a gyroscope not unlike the control moment gyroscope used on the International Space Station, the one that allows it to pivot in space without using fuel. It’s simple, easy to manufacture, and it can be made very small. This low-overhead application is why the GyroGlove’s power pack can be so thin and light: it doesn’t require a big battery to do what it does.

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

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/2...rom-parkinsons