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Google Takes On Parkinson’s One Bite at a Time
Source: spectrum.ieee.org - Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Last week, Google bought San Francisco startup Lift Labs for an undisclosed price. Lift creates devices to counteract the shaking caused by Parkinson’s disease and “essential tremor,” an even more common medical condition that triggers shaking. The company’s first product, introduced late last year for $300, is a tremor-cancellation handle with spoon and fork attachments for people whose shaking makes it difficult to eat without a struggle. The gadget really seems to make a difference—the company’s website displays touching e-mails from users, like one from a man who says he was able to eat a bowl of cereal for the first time in years. Lift Labs will live in Google’s Google X division, the not-so-secret secret branch of the company responsible for its self-driving car and Google Glass. Cofounder Anupam Pathak got the idea for this gizmo when he was a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, working on a military project focusing on how to stabilize rifles when the soldiers aiming them are shaky from stress. The approach uses a technology similar to active-noise cancellation in audio headphones. As he told Mechanical Engineering Magazine last year , “The basic issue I discovered is you can’t stop soldiers from trembling but you can accommodate it. With our device, we allow the hand to move but what you’re holding onto cancels its motion. Digital cameras already do this on a small scale so we’ve come up with technology to do
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