Health IT, Startups

Google’s latest digital health play is a $300 vibrating spoon for people with tremors

The latest addition to Google’s lineup of consumer health products is a small San Francisco […]

The latest addition to Google’s lineup of consumer health products is a small San Francisco design firm with a creative solution to make daily life a little easier for seniors with essential tremor or Parkinson’s disease.

Lift Labs designed a spoon with some fancy electronics in the handle. The handle senses the movement of a hand tremor and triggers a tiny motor to move the head of the spoon in the opposite direction, keeping it relatively stable while the user eats.

Google announced the undisclosed acquisition of Lift Labs in a Google+ post Wednesday, saying it plans to explore how the technology in Liftware can be used in other ways to help people with neurological diseases.

While Google executives have said the intense regulation of healthcare products will keep it from diving too far into the sector itself, it’s made a number of investments in life science companies and launched a company, Calico, to work on treatments for old-age-related diseases.

The Lift Labs buy is Google’s latest move in the consumer side of health – a notably non-regulated area – following the announcement of a forthcoming fitness data platform, Google Fit. Lift Labs will join the life science division of Google[x], the semi-secret research branch that also developed a glucose-sensing contact lens it recently out-licensed to a Novartis subsidiary.

MedCity News first covered LiftLabs when the startup was part of Rock Health’s fifth accelerator class last summer. The company said it will continue selling the Liftware device on its website.

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