Patient develops hands-free cursor controller

Aryeh joined the Israel Defense Forces in 2002, as a paratrooper. He suffered a serious injury left him with complex regional pain syndrome, a chronic condition caused by nerve damage to a limb.

During the treatment and healing process, Miri Berger, Aryeh’s wife, wanted to find a way to help one of her professors.

“One of Miri’s professors had lost his dominant arm 20 years prior and was teaching them Maya, a computer-based animation and modelling program where you use your hands on the mouse and keyboard. She saw him going back and forth with his non-dominant arm and everything took a lot longer and was frustrating”, the veteran recalled.
The professor told Miri he hadn’t found a mouse controller oriented to one-armed users, and she was determined to build such a device with Katz’s help. That’s how Crescent was born.

“We put Crescent on his arm, and he called his mother for the first time. At that time, I was working in the innovation lab at NYU, so I had access to a lot of equipment. We built something specifically to help Miri’s professor use his prosthetic limb to move the mouse. We decided to see if the idea could be adapted to work with touchscreens and gestures”, Aryeh explained.

Crescent is a patented innovation that sends commands to any smart device via Bluetooth — tablet, cellphone, laptop, TV – and takes an average of seven minutes to learn how to use. It helps people with upper limb deficiency to be more independent when using technology in their daily lives.

The couple got accepted to an Israeli accelerator and already won an award, and they are launching their own company and getting the gadget on the market.

“We have working prototypes we’re testing. We’re looking at partnerships for a beta pilot and we’re raising capital,” said Aryeh.

Adapted from: http://bit.do/eQt6G

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