The patients who are suffering from Parkinson’s disease, in order to provide assistance to these patients, a group of students from the IIT-Gandhinagar have developed a Neutra Spoon which is a special kind of spoon, to reduce the issue of food spillage due to tremors in these patients. In the BETiC Medical Innovation Challenge, the students have won a gold prize for the same design at the seventh Inter IIT Tech Meet for solving the problem.
Parkinson’s disease is a chronic movement disorder that is caused by deteriorating motor senses and its symptoms continue to worsen over time.
The person’s central nervous system is affected by the disease and the neurons cannot transmit information among themselves that result in rigid as well as slow or even absence of physical movement. A team of seven students of IIT Gandhinagar have designed and developed. The team members are:
- Shireesh Raghunath Shelke (B Tech in Mechanical Engineering, 2nd year)
- Vedanta Krishna Bhutani (BTech in Electrical Engineering, 2nd year)
- Saurabh Kartik Muneshwar (BTech in Mechanical Engineering, 2nd year)
- Ankur Vaibhav (BTech in Chemical Engineering, 2nd year)
- Akshay Biju (BTech in Electrical Engineering, 2nd year)
- Janvi Thakkar (BTech in Material Science and Engineering, 1st year)
- Maitreya Thakur (BTech in Material Science and Engineering, 1st year)
Without compromising with its efficiency to a great extent the spoon cost was reduced by making the spoon fully passive. By using a gimbals’ mechanism the spoon aims to reduce the effect of pill roll tremors.
