Tech company creates "smart" spoon that controls tremors

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November 27, 2014 4:53 PM

Google's specially made spoons use hundreds of algorithms, and the technology senses how a hand is shaking and instantly makes adjustments to stay balanced.

Thanks to Google's latest invention, people with Parkinson's disease can now eat without spilling their food, due to shaky hands.

In clinical trials, the Liftware spoons reduced shaking of the spoon bowl by an average of 76 percent.

Google spokesperson, Katelin Jabbari said: "We want to help people in their daily lives today and hopefully increase understanding of disease in the long run. Other adaptive devices have been developed to help people with tremors — rocker knives, weighted utensils, pen grips. But until now, experts say, technology has not been used in this way."

Speaking about the invention, UC San Francisco Medical Centre neurologist, Dr Jill Ostrem, who specializes in movement disorders like Parkinson's disease and essential tremors said, "It's totally novel."

Ostrem helped advise the inventors and says the device, which has a fork attachment, has been a remarkable asset for some of her patients.

"I have some patients who couldn't eat independently, they had to be fed, and now they can eat on their own," she said. "It doesn't cure the disease — they still have tremor — but it's a very positive change."

Google got into the no-shake utensil business in September, acquiring a small, National of Institutes of Health-funded startup called Lift Labs for an undisclosed sum.

Lift Lab founder, Anupam Pathak said moving from a small, four-person startup in San Francisco to the vast Google campus in Mountain View has freed him up to be more creative as he explores how to apply the technology even more broadly.

His team works at the search giant's division called Google(x) Life Sciences, which is also developing a smart contact lens that measures glucose levels in tears for diabetics and is researching how nanoparticles in blood might help detect diseases.

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