A pair of Rice University students are harnessing cutting-edge neuroscience to design an affordable, wearable solution for people living with Parkinson’s disease around the world.
Undergraduate engineering students Emmie Casey and Tomi Kuye, under the guidance of Maria Oden and Heather Bisesti with support from the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), have created a vibrotactile glove that aims to reduce the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s through a noninvasive approach. Their design is based on promising research out of the Peter Tass lab at Stanford University, which explores how randomized vibratory stimuli delivered to the fingertips could help rewire misfiring neurons in the brain — a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease.
The Stanford team’s clinical trials showed that coordinated reset stimulation via vibrations helped patients regain motor control and reduce abnormal brain activity. Remarkably, these effects lasted after users removed the gloves and no longer experienced the stimulation in their fingertips.
Casey and Kuye saw an opportunity to harness this research and develop a low-cost version of the gloves Stanford was creating, making improvements to the design along the way.
“We wanted to take this breakthrough and make it accessible to people who would never be able to afford an expensive medical device,” Casey said. “We set out to design a glove that delivers the same therapeutic vibrations but at a fraction of the cost.”
Their prototype replaces the costly motors used in other designs with the same tiny vibration motors found in smartphones. These are embedded into each fingertip of a soft, wireless glove and driven by a custom-designed printed circuit board located at the wrist.
While many of the existing glove designs for Parkinson’s focus on stabilizing tremors with weights or rigid structures, the Rice team’s solution goes deeper by targeting the root of the neurological disruption.
“This glove is designed to stimulate the Pacinian corpuscles within the fingertips to help resynchronize the neurons within the brain that cause tremors and stiffness,” Kuye said. “We’re not just masking symptoms. We’re aiming to actually retrain this part of the brain.”
The students’ commitment to accessibility goes beyond engineering. In addition to developing a commercial version priced at approximately $250, they’ve also published open-source instructions online for anyone who wants to build their own glove at home. The team has received interest from more than 200 individuals around the world, many of whom lack the technical expertise to assemble the device themselves. In response, Casey and Kuye have formed a nonprofit and are using a sliding scale price model to ensure cost is never a barrier. They are also taking preorders on their website and accepting donations with the hope of releasing the first 500 pairs by this fall.
Meanwhile, Casey and Kuye are working to secure Institutional Review Board approval to evaluate the usability of the device, and they say they hope to collaborate with partners in the Texas Medical Center to evaluate the device’s effectiveness with patients.
“This project exemplifies what we strive for at the OEDK — empowering students to translate cutting-edge research into real-world solutions,” said Oden, teaching professor of bioengineering, director of the OEDK and co-director of the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health Technologies . “Emmie and Tomi have shown extraordinary initiative and empathy in developing a device that could bring meaningful relief to people living with Parkinson’s, no matter their resources.”
Initial anecdotal feedback has been promising. One early prototype, built for a friend’s mother with early onset Parkinson’s, yielded surprising results.
“After about six months of wearing the gloves regularly, she was able to walk unaided,” Casey said, adding that their current recommendation is for users to wear the glove for approximately two hours twice a day to maximize benefit.
“We’re not claiming it’s a cure,” Kuye said. “But if it can give people just a little more control, a little more freedom, that’s life changing.”