Thank You BIE
Alleviating Essential Tremor
As the Biodesign Immersion Experience internship draws to a close, our team is finalizing our solution. Before looking at our latest design, let us take a look at our journey to this point. Our initial project statement was to develop a product to better enable geriatric patients with essential tremors better interact with touchscreen technology. However, after our 38 total interviews we conducted this summer, we moved from addressing touchscreen technology, to drinking from a glass, and finally to alleviating and reducing tremors as a whole.
Now for our culminating idea: a non-invasive, wearable device that utilizes the principles of tuned mass dampers to minimize essential tremors within the arm and wrist. We call our prototype the Oski Watch. Crucial design features include active tremor suppression as well as the product being lightweight, aesthetically pleasing, and adjustable.
On top of the Oski Watch and reducing essential tremors as whole, another big gap that needs to be addressed is the fact that there are 3 crucial problems with current assistive devices for ET. Our customer interviews corroborated that ET patients either view existing devices as too expensive or ineffective, or simply do not know of existing products on the market. We feel that the last point is a big problem which is why we also prototyped a web design for an ecommerce website: assistivETech. Our ecommerce website serves as a hub that catalogs all existing assistive devices for essential tremors in addition to providing a review and rating system.
Farewell From Team Oski
As we finish out this last blog Team Oski would like to take the time to thank the UC Berkeley Biodesign Immersion Experience. First off, we want to thank Professor Herr and Dr. Jenkins for still offering this internship and quickly adjusting to COVID-19 in order to allow us to participate in this program remotely. We also want to acknowledge Dr. Schwartz, or clinical client, as well as Darren Cooke and Rhonda Schrader. Once again, this whole program was only made possible by the current situation we are in which enables us to reach out to all different kinds of stakeholders, whether it be patients, support groups, physicians, or industry experts, via Zoom and gain a well-rounded perspective and knowledge-base of essential tremors.
Team Oski, signing off.
