First year students of mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and material science worked on finding cost-effective solutions to the tremor management problem faced by patients of Parkinson's disease.
In a great relief to patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, a group of students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, have developed a spoon that reduces food spillage due to tremors. The students have won a gold prize for their design which is cost-effective, at the seventh edition of the Inter IIT Tech Meet held at IIT Bombay. As part of the tech meet, a medical innovation challenge was organised where engineering students from across the country were given problem statements faced by Indians, to solve.
Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disease, characterised by symptoms that make the daily life of a patient challenging. As the disease progresses, motor symptoms such as tremors or shaking, stiffness, slow movements, and unsteady balance can make it difficult to accomplish everyday tasks.
First year students of mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and material science worked on finding cost-effective solutions to the tremor management problem faced by patients of Parkinson's disease.
Speaking about the design, Shireesh Shelke, a second year student of mechanical engineering said, "Parkinson's disease patients find it challenging to eat with normal spoons due to unavoidable tremors. Also, the existing solutions are too costly or not effective enough to solve this problem. We designed a cheaper, more efficient and user-friendly spoon called Neutra Spoon which works on simple torque balancing mechanism. The Neutra spoon is a totally passive device which consists of a simple gimbal mechanism. A gimbal is a support that allows the rotation of an object about a single axis."
The product is a totally passive device which means it does not contain any electrical components thereby reducing its cost. The spoon costs Rs 45 including manufacturing processes as against existing solutions such as Liftware spoon, ELISpoon which cost around Rs 10,000 to 20,000 each.
Shelke added, "The spoon was also given a slight bend (20 degrees) to make it more stable. The orientation of the handle was an important factor and was found out by trial and error method. For each step, we made a vibrating apparatus to check for improvements, based on their efficiency in relation to a normal spoon. We also had to include some novel features – which was the geometric constraint. Due to this constraint, one could also slice food items such as ice-creams and sweets using the spoon itself."
While the students wanted to test on patients, they did not get permission for the same. "We had approached the Ahmedabad Parkinson's Society to conduct tests but they told us that the entire process takes time and we did not have so much time for the same. Hence, we then created stimulators and tested the frequency of tremors," he said.
About the next step, Shelke said, "Since the design has been approved by the jury, we now want to be aggressive in testing on patients to understand the accuracy of the design. Eventually, we will get into the ergnomics of the spoon to provide better comfort."
The team members include Vedanta Bhutani, Saurabh Muneshwar, Akshay Biju, Ankur Vaibhav, Janvi Thakkar and Maitreya Thakur, apart from Shelke.
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