Hi HN, I'm Gerard, Cofounder and Architect at halfmarble. I live with Young-Onset Parkinson's Disease (YOPD).
The consumer smartwatch industry is failing Parkinson's patients. The wrist acts as a mechanical shock absorber, making it nearly impossible to accurately track the fine, independent digit kinematics—like the classic "pill-rolling" tremor—that define our disease. The industry's alternative? Expensive smart rings that force patients with severe rigidity to fiddle with tiny chargers every night.
We needed a better way, so we engineered a solution entirely outside the box.
Yesterday, halfmarble officially filed 4 defensive patents for UnSteadyRing: a "Reversed Topology" wearable architecture. We shifted 100% of the active power to two wrist hubs (which do contain standard batteries). The fingers themselves are tracked using 10 passive, chipless rings. Zero silicon. Zero batteries in the rings. Inexpensive to manufacture. The hubs use passive RF telemetry to excite the rings and read them back, fusing that data with continuous autonomic biometrics.
As a maker living with YOPD, my goal isn't to build a proprietary medical device and sell out to a VC firm. I filed these patents defensively so no tech giant can ever steal this architecture and lock our biological data behind a paywall. UnSteadyRing is an open "Glass Box" architecture, driven via closed-loop data flow. You own your raw data.
We have the physics modeled and the architecture legally secured. Now, we are building the chassis. If there are any hardware hackers or SDR/RF engineers here, I'd love your feedback.
I'll be hanging around all day to answer questions about the RF telemetry, the architecture, or our open-source hardware approach!
gerard-hm•1h ago
The consumer smartwatch industry is failing Parkinson's patients. The wrist acts as a mechanical shock absorber, making it nearly impossible to accurately track the fine, independent digit kinematics—like the classic "pill-rolling" tremor—that define our disease. The industry's alternative? Expensive smart rings that force patients with severe rigidity to fiddle with tiny chargers every night.
We needed a better way, so we engineered a solution entirely outside the box.
Yesterday, halfmarble officially filed 4 defensive patents for UnSteadyRing: a "Reversed Topology" wearable architecture. We shifted 100% of the active power to two wrist hubs (which do contain standard batteries). The fingers themselves are tracked using 10 passive, chipless rings. Zero silicon. Zero batteries in the rings. Inexpensive to manufacture. The hubs use passive RF telemetry to excite the rings and read them back, fusing that data with continuous autonomic biometrics.
As a maker living with YOPD, my goal isn't to build a proprietary medical device and sell out to a VC firm. I filed these patents defensively so no tech giant can ever steal this architecture and lock our biological data behind a paywall. UnSteadyRing is an open "Glass Box" architecture, driven via closed-loop data flow. You own your raw data.
We have the physics modeled and the architecture legally secured. Now, we are building the chassis. If there are any hardware hackers or SDR/RF engineers here, I'd love your feedback.
I'll be hanging around all day to answer questions about the RF telemetry, the architecture, or our open-source hardware approach!
https://halfmarble.com https://halfmarble.com/blog/unsteady-ring.html