High School Kid Develops A Wearable Device For Parkinson's Patients

UTKARSH TANDON'S ONERING STARTED AS A SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT. NOW HE'S BRINGING HIS 3-D PRINTED MONITORING DEVICE TO MARKET ON KICKSTARTER.

In 2014, Utkarsh Tandon, at the time a freshman at Cupertino High School in California, developed a machine learning model for his science fair project that collected and classified data on sufferers of Parkinson's disease. He won the fair, and, as part of his first place award, received a grant from the UCLA Brain Research Institute. A year later, the high school sophomore has turned his science experiment into a marketable product. The OneRing, now raising funds on Kickstarter, is a wearable device that monitors Parkinson's patients' tremors and delivers the data to an iOS app in the form of a digestible daily report.

The OneRing, named for the powerful ring at the center of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, is a 3-D printed plastic ring topped with a flashdrive-like box that houses a Bluetooth microchip. Using an algorithm developed by Tandon, the device senses tremors commonly experienced by Parkinson's patients, classifies them based on severity, and generates a daily report that provides time-stamped analytics about the users' movements during each hour of the day. The movement patterns of the hand are divided into three categories: dyskinesia, bradykinesia, and tremor. "With these classifications it can be packaged in these very coherent patient reports that the physicians and the patients can read and interact with in a way that better recommends medication," Tandon says.

Read More:
source: FASTCOMPANY
By: MEG MILLER