Shared from parkinsonsnewstoday.com.
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.”