Design strategies for a drinking cup to accommodate hand tremor

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002818

Hand tremor is an involuntary muscle movement, trembling, or shaking of the hands. Caused by either essential tremor (ET) or Parkinson's disease, tremors often affect daily activities including feeding, drinking, typing, and writing. To reveal the design strategies to diminish effects of hand tremor in handheld devices, and in particular a drinking cup in this research, an experimental framework based on vibrations and dynamics has been developed with inspiration from the well-known gyroscopic boat stabilizers, i.e. Schlick stabilizers, in which a high speed rotating disk has been used as a source of angular momentum, producing a resistive gyroscopic torque when an input torque caused by ocean waves acts on the boat. Using a rotating gimbal, this resistive torque can be converted to a useful stabilizing torque which is in the opposite direction of incoming disturbance torques, whether induced from ocean waves or hand tremor. The prototype was built and its preliminary testing was completed, and further results include mathematical modeling and simulations, to demonstrate the validity of the approach taken. In short, it can be stated that when the gyro-disk in the drinking cup is spinning at high speeds, one feels the dampening effects of the resistive torque on the hand. However, human-subjects experiments need to be conducted for future work to validate the efficacy of the device.