This High School Student Has Created a Device to Help Parkinson's Patients

When Utkarsh Tandon was 10 years old, he saw a YouTube video of Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic torch. The tremors of the former heavyweight champion sparked his curiosity, and soon, Tandon was reading about Parkinson’s disease. The wheels in his head were already turning on how he could help those who suffered from it.

Fast forward to a few years later when Tandon was in a computer science class, studying machine learning. While researching, he stumbled upon a study in which a phone was secured to the hands of Parkinson’s patients and used to assess their tremors. With that, Tandon was on his way to creating OneRing—a 3-D printed wearable device that was just funded (twice over) on Kickstarter.

Named for the prized ring in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, OneRing goes on a patient’s finger and monitors their movements throughout the day. It categorizes those movements based on severity into three categories: dyskinesia, bradykinesia, and tremor. The time-stamped data then appears on an iOS app in the form of a daily report, helping patients and doctors best determine a course of treatment.

The plastic ring contains a box on top that holds a Bluetooth microchip, not unlike other wearable devices like the Fitbit. And like other wearable devices, Tandon is still working on making the design a little more fashion-friendly. He told FastCoDesign: "It has to be something people want to wear. I want to make it look good while it's doing the diagnosis in the background."

OneRing actually started as a 2014 science fair project when Tandon was a high school freshman. He created a machine learning model that did essentially what the product does today—gathers and classifies information on Parkinson’s patients. He won, and received a grant from the UCLA Brain Research Institute, which propelled the development.

Check out OneRing and hear Tandon explain the device in the video above.

[h/t FastCoDesign]

Images via Kickstarter.