Tremor and Smart Spoon

When putting food in your mouth is a challenge: Google’s algorithmically driven spoon called ‘Smart Spoon’ may help people with Movement Disorders live a little easier.

Tremors, we’ve all seen people who have it. They are emotional, for instance, nervous, angry or tired. If not, they have neurological problems where their body can’t control fine movements of the arms and legs.

A tremor caused by an emotional issue: (like being nervous) can be easily controlled. Don’t be nervous; let it pass; and the tremors pass along with it.

However, tremors with neurological issues: have a lifetime of difficulty and anguish due to the simple lack of motor control. It affects their mobility, their work and, yes, even their ability to eat.

Google’s engineering and design teams have prototyped a solution which may help people with neurological issues. It’s a spoon, a spoon with some pretty heavy duty engineering behind it. The handle contains multiple solutions to overcome the terming of the hand that is holding it, eventually, stabilizing the business end of the spoon; giving you a less messy meal through the miracle of algorithms and engineering.

I thought it would be a good idea to discuss what tremors actually are and how they are caused in the body. It’s great that technology is coming out to help people with these issues, but understanding the basic disease is essential for patients as well as their friends and family.

A tremor is defined as “An unintentional, rhythmic, oscillation of a body part in a fixed plane”. More important than defining it though is the need to understand it.

Most of the joints in our fingers, arms and legs are moved by groups of muscles that work equally and in opposition to each other. Want to raise your arm up, one of your shoulder muscles will contract to make that happen. Want to force your hand down against resistance, an equal and opposite muscle will move the arm down.

These muscles all have tone, that means that they are kept in a very light but continuous state of contraction. They are not fully contracted but are primed for any action at a moment’s notice.

The tone, priming and the firing of the muscle fibers themselves is controlled by multiple parts of the brain and spinal cord acting in concert. If your nervous system gets the signals wrong or primes things wrong then that equal, opposite and exquisite balance between opposing muscles is lost and they tend to fight each other instead of giving you a smooth movement, giving rise to a tremor.

There are different kinds of tremors based on what is causing them:

• Physiological Tremors: are the ones I talked about in the beginning, like when you are nervous you might tremble a bit. It’s natural.
• Essential Tremors: are a specific diagnosis where the characteristic tremor is seen when the person changes posture and when they actively move their muscles. The tremors all seem to have a frequency of 4-7 Hz. These tremors may begin early in life, and generally get worse with age. Then there are other specific tremors, Parkinson tremors, dystonic tremors etc. Here the tremor is specific to the disease.

Treatment for any movement disorder or tremor is all about finding what’s wrong and fixing that. In cases like essential tremors where the cause is not all that obvious, physical therapy, sedatives and beta blockers are different ways to attack the issue.

A good movement disorder clinic which is staffed by neurologists and physiotherapists is the place to go to, to deal tremors.