Steady Hands wins Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in New Mexico’s Third District

When asked what inspired the creation of Steady Hands, the students said, “My group mates and I were searching for a MESA project that covered equity vs. equality. With that in mind, we wanted to create a project that can help someone in the real world. We thought about Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and how millions of Americans are affected by this, then told Dr. Steve Cox, a professor at Northern New Mexico College. After doing so, Dr. Cox introduced our group to Brandon Santos, who had been suffering from Parkinson’s since 2014. When Brandon approached Dr. Cox, he asked our team to seek help about building a similar glove shown by Dr. Tass and his lab in the Today’s Show news coverage that they watched on the television. We did research and learned that those gloves are not yet available in the market and the clinical trials are not accepting patients.
  

Brandon and Minna Santos, his wife and caretaker, told us how incredibly difficult his life had been because PD hindered his ability to walk, talk, and execute routine daily tasks like getting out of bed, drinking water, and holding objects still. Brandon’s PD symptoms were a burden to his everyday life and impeded Minna as well because it was difficult for her to determine when to help Brandon.

One common treatment for PD is to prescribe L-DOPA to patients so their brains can convert it into dopamine and replenish its concentration. This will reduce symptoms but has the potential to induce schizophrenic symptoms which result from too much dopamine. Unfortunately, Brandon had no longer benefited from L-DOPA because he had developed tolerance to it, later causing him to suffer from psychosis from an imbalance of dopamine from his prescription. Minna even said she recalled a couple of times when Brandon had forgotten who she was, so he’d turn aggressive and become unfriendly.

In June 2024, Brandon passed away, but by this time we had more clients and people interested in our research, so now we continue improving our project in the name of Brandon and everyone else who’s suffered greatly because of this disease. We know there is currently no cure for Parkinson’s, so we hope our fascinating approach is the development of wearable devices, such as gloves, to assist all these individuals with Parkinson’s.”