Stabilis – Providing relief for tremor patients

Project Information

STABILIS

Grant agreement ID: 190190785

DOI

10.3030/190190785

Project closed

EC signature date 17 July 2023

Start date 1 June 2023

End date 30 November 2025

Funded under

• The European Innovation Council (EIC)

Total cost

€ 2 337 076,25

EU contribution

€ 1 635 953,00

Coordinated by

STIL BV
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - STABILIS (Stabilis – Providing relief for tremor patients)

Reporting period: 2024-06-01 to 2025-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Over 30 million people worldwide suffer from involuntary shaky hands, known as tremors. This symptom is commonly associated with Parkinson’s disease, but is even more prevalent for people with essential tremor.

Tremors make simple everyday tasks, such as eating and drinking difficult or impossible. Consequently, patients feel ashamed and frustrated, require help with daily activities, and ultimately experience a poor quality of life.

Current currents are often not sufficient in reducing symptoms. Generally speaking, pharmacological treatments suppress around 50% of the symptoms for half the people. Surgical intervention can provide much greater reduction, but at the costs of being very invasive, and eligible for a small patient population.

STIL developed a novel method of using mechanical joint damping to reduce action tremors. This anti-tremor orthosis is fully mechanical, and was clinically effective for essential tremor in the forearm. A subgroup of patients, nevertheless.

The goal within the EIC project is to go far beyond that. The Stabilis, the next generation anti-tremor orthosis, is aimed to serve the entire patient population and covered by health insurance, thereby truly creating a new treatment option for millions affected by tremors.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

For the first reporting period, we made great development steps for the Stabilis device, and a novel method of fitting the to-be product to the user. The Stabilis device, even in its preliminary form, already showed promising results during usability tests.
Apart from that, we investigated clinical parameters that can be used to provide cost-effective evidence.

At the finalization of the project, the Stabilis device showed to reduce action tremors for multiple tremor disorders.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

More clinical validation is needed to bring Stabilis into a market-ready shape, and obtain a CE-mark.
In addition, both the adoption of distributing partners, and medical specialists is needed for good market implementation of the product.

At the conclusion of the project, we found that the market was already getting aware of anti-tremor orthotics, mostly because of the efforts we did engaging with stakeholders (neurologists, therapists, industry players). This shall help with the adoption of Stabilis when it hits the market. We foresee this innovation can be both ground-breaking in the way tremors are treated, and revolutionary in the O&P industry.