May 12, 2023 — Enterprising students at Northwestern University outside Chicago have invented a pen set that allows Parkinson’s disease patients to resume writing despite tremors from the disease.
SteadyScrib, a pen designed with these symptoms in mind, seeks to counter Parkinson’s unsteady tremors with pens that have a magnetic core and a flexible grip. The specialized pen is intended to help with three symptoms of Parkinson’s disease: tremors, slowness of movement, and stiffness.
A thin, steel-lined board and four magnets hold the paper in place. Filled with a heavy core and held with a flexible grip, the pen stabilizes the unsteady motion that often affects a Parkinson’s patient’s ability to write. The magnetic force of the pen on the clipboard stabilizes the pen tip and the user can write legibly with ease.
Isabelle Mokotoff, a junior majoring in journalism at Northwestern and co-founder of SteadyScrib, said her goal was to create an intuitively designed pen for Parkinson’s patients.
“I think our core values are that we wanted it to be specialized, which means that there is currently no writing solution on the market that is designed specifically for people with Parkinson’s,” Mokotoff said. “We wanted to cater especially to that market because there is a huge gap in the quality of life.”
Mokotoff came up with the idea when his grandfather, a lifelong writer, lost the ability to write due to Parkinson’s. Mokotoff shared his frustration with his sorority sister and Northwestern University junior Alexis Chan, a biomedical engineering student who helped bring Mokotoff’s vision to life.
Mokotoff and Chan conducted more than 100 interviews with Parkinson’s patients, their families, and occupational therapists to validate the need for a writing tool for Parkinson’s patients.
They tested various materials before settling on neodymium magnets as the key to creating a pen that stabilizes tremor for people with the disease. Using the 3D printer in the Garage, Northwestern’s innovation lab, students created the first prototypes last summer. They then set out to try out the pen games at a local support group for people with Parkinson’s, Evanston Movers and Shakers.
The SteadyScrib pen set, created via 3D printers at the Garage, an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship space for students at Northwestern University.
Cissy Lacks, a member of Movers and Shakers, tried the SteadyScrib pen set and said it worked better than other pens she had tried before. Lacks has had Parkinson’s for 3 years with mild symptoms. As a contributor to a theater review for the local newspaper, the Evanston Round TableLacks hopes to use the invention to take notes during interviews.
He said the pen set also addresses needs like writing cards for friends and family, filling out forms and questionnaires for the doctor’s office, or writing checks.
“Instead of my hand stopping or getting tired, it just moved very easily,” Lacks said. “So my hand didn’t put much effort into making [the pen] work. And the font size remains the same, which is really important.”
Lacks said that when living with Parkinson’s disease, intention is important in taking action. However, this only temporarily applies to writing, as letters tend to get smaller due to dysgraphia, a neurological condition that affects handwriting in a number of ways. She said that SteadyScrib seemed to solve this problem.
“I can really think about the writing and it looks good, but two lines later it could get a lot smaller. But that was not the case with this system. It pretty much stayed the same,” she said.
The SteadyScrib Pen Set includes a pen with a neodymium magnetic core and a metal foil under the paper.
Rebecca Gilbert, MD, PhD, chief scientific officer for the Parkinson’s Disease Association of America, said she has seen utensils and pens for Parkinson’s patients, but no devices that use magnets to stabilize tremors.
Gilbert said that Parkinson’s disease affects patients’ motor planning skills, especially when the patient is at rest. Dystonia, or involuntary muscle contractions, and dyskinesia, or muscle spasms, are symptoms that can disrupt the writing process.
According to Mokotoff, more than 1,000 people have added their names to a Waiting list for a SteadyScrib set. Demand is greater than manufacturing capacity in the innovation space on campus, so SteadyScrib is now looking for a partner to help scale production to meet consumer needs. SteadyScrib received five grants totaling $43,680, and Mokotoff said SteadyScrib is working with several potential partners interested in manufacturing the product.
Chan said SteadyScrib plans to add an additional feature to retract the pen tip to prevent ink from drying out. SteadyScrib is also working to tailor the pen to its users’ Parkinson’s symptoms.
For example, patients fall into a spectrum of Parkinson’s symptoms as a result of tremors from other neurological challenges. Mokotoff said his team is working to adjust the pen based on these findings for a more inclusive and responsive product.
“We designed our pen [based] about the most common qualifying inhibitory symptoms,” Mokotoff said. “But you know, worry is not one size fits all.”
Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that causes tremors in movements or difficulty walking and talking in severe cases. As the symptoms progress, fine motor skills such as writing become increasingly difficult to achieve. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Parkinson’s is the second most common neurodegenerative after Alzheimer’s in the United States.
SteadyScrib is proprietary and the co-founders send monthly development updates via a newsletter
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