Self-Stabilizing spoon for Parkinson’s patients and functionally challenged people

Abstract

Parkinson's disease is a common neurodegenerative disorder that affects older people because of environmental or genetic factors. It is defined as a brain disorder that causes unattended or uncontrollable movements such as shaking, stiffness, and difficulties with balance and coordination [3]. There is no cure for disease so far, so the aim of this paper is to produce a stabilizing spoon that will help the patient eat by themselves without the need for help from others, which increases self-confidence. The spoon remains fixed in its horizontal position no matter how strong the tremor is in the patient's hand. In recent years, stabilizing assistive devices have been in continuous development, but what makes this paper special is the low cost of the device. This paper consists of a gyroscope and accelerometer, which they use to measure angles and acceleration, then send them back to the microcontrollers to ensure that the spoon is in the horizontal position. All these measuring features are on one chip, as the one used in this paper, which called IMU (MPU6050); also, this paper consists of two servomotors, one for the movement in pitch angle and the other for the roll angle. All components of the paper were selected to achieve one of the most important objectives of this paper, which is low cost.