WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Our Founding Story

In the fall of 2017, seventeen mechanical engineering seniors at MIT were given a capstone challenge: imagine a superpower. Their theme was the hands.

One idea came from Daniel Carballo, then a mechanical engineering student studying bio-inspired robotics and neural control of movement. In his research, a question had started to take shape: what if tremor was, in part, a problem of feedback control? What if an engineering solution could help where pharmacology had not?

Mechanical stimulation at the wrist. Fed into the body’s own feedback loop. Designed to subtract the tremor signal before it reached the hand.

It sounded impossible. Still, they built.

No one expected the prototype to work. A week before final presentations, the team tested it on a man with severe tremor, an interior renovator whose hands were how he made a living, and whose tremor was making both work and life harder.

They placed the rudimentary prototype on his wrist and turned it on.

His tremor stopped like a light switch. His wife and daughter began to cry.

The man did not want to give the device back. The team had to explain that it was not yet proven safe to leave with him. So they took it back, with apologies.

One week later, he returned for MIT’s final capstone presentations. The auditorium was packed. The event was livestreamed. The team had seen the device work only once.

They turned it on again. It worked again. The audience applauded.

During the Q&A, someone asked how he felt wearing it. He said:

That was the moment everything changed.

After the presentation, messages began to arrive from families of people living with Parkinson’s and essential tremor, asking how they could get a device. The answer, then, was heartbreaking: there was only one. Even the man on stage could not keep it.

Most of the original capstone team moved on. Three stayed: Daniel Carballo, Allison Davanzo, and Kyle Pina.