High-Tech Spoon for Persons with Cerebral Palsy

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(DailyDemocrat.com): OAKLAND >> A comfortable dinner for Tyrone Cobb involves a towel and the floor of his parents’ home. The 40-year-old with cerebral palsy stretches out on his stomach to eat many of his meals.

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He’s accustomed to eating finger foods — pizza, corn dogs, chips. When he eats out with his family, assistance is needed. All the soft-spoken poet wants is to eat at the table on Thanksgiving with relatives.

The wishbone is his to win this year.

On Friday, the Union City resident became one of the first to get the Liftware Level, a utensil designed by Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, to make meals more enjoyable for people with limited hand and arm mobility.

The tech company surprised Cobb with the spoon during lunchtime at Ability Now, a center at 4500 Lincoln Ave. that serves people with cerebral palsy, where Cobb and others served as testers for the product.

He was wondering why he was asked to wait to eat a stew of rice, beans and meat. Twenty four of the devices were donated anonymously to Ability Now.

“At first, I thought I was just a tester for the spoon,” Cobb said. “I didn’t know I was going to get one.”

Its design is sleek. Think electric toothbrush battery meets smartphone technology. Inside, the same sensors used to orient smartphones talk to a tiny computer. The fast-moving conversation figures out the movement of the hand to keep the utensil level at all times.

Cobb ate his stew spill free.

“It’s almost impossible to spill,” said Anupam Pathak, a technical leader at Google who helped develop the product, later adding, “it is able to calculate (movements) thousands of times per second.”

The idea came about when Maureen DeCost, marketing and communications director at Ability Now, said she saw another utensil, Liftware, designed by Verily for people with hand tremors. So she emailed Google. “To my utter shock, they emailed me back,” DeCost said.

A team of developers from South San Francisco’s Verily, a life sciences-based research organization, were soon working on a prototype and talking with Cobb and others with cerebral palsy about how they eat and what they needed. Cobb volunteered to test the prototype and on Friday joked he had wanted one for Christmas.

Verily, which introduced the Liftware Level in December, is selling the $195 utensil on its website. The device allows users to remove the head of the spoon and stick a fork in it. Pathak said the company is exploring other uses for the device.

For now, the 24 donated will be a big help to Ability Now. Formerly known as the Cerebral Palsy Center of the East Bay, the facility opened in 1956 for children with disabilities and later became an adult program once disabled children began attending public schools. The center offers everything from a computer lab, small- business center and wellness program to adaptive yoga and acupuncture. Many classes have waiting lists.

“We seem to be the biggest and best secret in Oakland and the East Bay,” DeCost said during a tour of the facility on Friday, which ended with the presentation of the high-tech spoons.

First with Liftware and now with Liftware Level, Pathak looks on as families watch loved ones feed themselves, sometimes for the first time in their life.

“These are people in their 20s,” he said. “They have tears in their eyes. It’s a really emotional thing to see.”

Cobb said he doesn’t mind eating on the floor or in his wheelchair but was smiling Friday, clutching his new spoon in his right hand.

“It doesn’t just help us,” he said. “It helps people understand we are people, too.”