The problem Self-Stabilizing Spoon with Remote Monitoring solves

Parkinson’s disease is a neurological degenerative disease that results in irrepressible shivers in the limbs. Due to unintended tremors in their arms, patients are unable to perform everyday menial tasks like eating food out of a bowl with a spoon.
The stabilizing spoon compensates for unintended tremors or shivers received from the user and calibrates its head against these forces, thus keeping the spoon bowl stable at all times. This spoon can move as quickly as 500°/second, hence effectively steadying the spoon and easing the eating process of patients.
Another part of the holistic product is a mobile application for a designated doctor to monitor the patient’s progress.
During this pandemic, people have been terrified of entering hospitals for non-COVID diseases and ailments, and we aim to create and market a product to help people adjust better to this new norm.
We have developed an application that analyses data collected from the spoon via sensors and statistically displays it to the designated doctor. By using this application, a doctor can not only monitor your progress but also offer diagnosis and treatment remotely, without the patient needing to leave their home.
With this project, the absolute aim is to make a product that can make a patient’s life easier.
The product will not only make it easy for the user to eat food out of a plate/bowl but also help their recovery by enabling inexpensive and thorough communication with a designated doctor.
In an age where people are petrified of the thought of entering the premises of a hospital, we are trying to use all the technical experience we have to create an experience that avoids as much physical contact as possible.
In the case of neuro diseases associated with nerves and muscles, it is imperative for the doctor to check up on the patient’s movements regularly, but we have attempted to find a way for doing that without requiring the patient to ever enter a hospital.

Challenges we ran into

One of the most major bugs was the servo motor which malfunctioned as we assembled the product. It took us over 2 hours to reprogram the entire hardware successfully to make it work.

Another issue we faced was while using a nodeMCU for cloud connectivity. Sending data from the MPU-6050 sensor to the nodeMCU to push it up to the server was a big hassle. The libraries had to be reinstalled over 20 times to make this work.

While making the Application, the speed of the data coming in was extremely crucial. We multithreaded the app in java to make the real-time data response as quick as possible.