These days, the gloves are everywhere.
Some 150 pairs of the high-tech pieces of wearable machinery — which emit gentle pulses to the fingertips in an effort to alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease — have been dispersed across Africa, Europe, Latin America and several U.S. states.
A pair of gloves got their start in Española.
Since 2023, students at Española Valley High School and Northern New Mexico College have been working together — alongside professors, teachers and community volunteers — to replicate and improve a vibrating glove that was developed at Stanford University. The glove has been found to reduce tremors, abnormal walking patterns and balance issues typical of Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder that damages neurons in the brain and results in impaired movement.
In the years since, Española Valley has rallied around the project. Now the purview of an independent nonprofit Española GloveWorks, it has secured grant funding to pay student interns for their work on the gloves and brought on medical professionals to research the gloves’ efficacy, said Steve Cox, an associate professor of engineering at Northern New Mexico College who leads the project with Española Valley High teachers Janice Badongen Patal-e and Lyne Salero. A former IBM engineer and a fashion design teacher are even lending their skills to redesign the glove to be less bulky and easier to construct.
The project’s “secret sauce” is a mentorship program, Cox said: About 10 outside volunteers mentor about 10 Northern New Mexico College students, who in turn mentor about 20 high schoolers. Since the glove was developed using open-source software and constructed with readily available materials, he hopes others can replicate its structure and its symptom-reducing product throughout New Mexico and all over the world.
“We’re creating training materials that should be usable by people that have high school engineering labs at their disposal — which really just means 3-D printers and soldering irons, a voltmeter and a laptop or two,” Cox said. “It’s a way to grow the social enterprise.”
Program growth
GloveWorks’ weekly meetings are a “beehive” of activity, Cox said. While some students get to work soldering circuits, others craft code.
Volunteers pitch in, too. Chuck Wright, a former design engineer with IBM, is assisting with hardware design, looking for ways to make the glove slimmer. Malabika Goldar, an artist who teaches fashion design and art at Moving Arts Española, is redesigning the glove to make it easier to construct and put on.
That work is unlikely to slow down any time soon. The program has received a $25,000 Youth Civic Infrastructure Fund grant from the New Mexico Community Trust to fund 12 paid internships for high school students plus four more for Northern New Mexico College student mentors.
Students are developing an app to monitor patients’ gait and voice, allowing them to tune the glove’s functions to best address their Parkinson’s symptoms. The concept is similar to a self-regulating insulin pump, though adapting to data on Parkinson’s symptoms is more complex than measuring and responding to insulin levels.
To help with the human health assessment side of the project, Cox said the program has partnered with Northern New Mexico College nursing professors and students.
“I’m super proud of that kind of cross-disciplinary approach — bringing in students from many, many facets of the college,” Cox said, adding the next addition may be a business student to manage inventory, oversee projects, and direct product testing.
Seeking more data
Emma Schutz, a registered nurse pursuing more nursing education at Northern New Mexico College, is helping develop the patient health assessment for the new app and collecting data to demonstrate the gloves’ efficacy.
“We’re in that kind of babyish phase where the gloves are clearly providing relief to these patients, but that is not enough. We obviously need to back ourselves up with data,” she said.
Originally from Lyden — an unincorporated community in Rio Arriba County — Schutz is working to mentor GloveWorks participants interested in the medical field and “give all the encouragement” they need to pursue that path.
She tells the students: “You can do it. … There can be bumps in the road, and some kids take unorthodox ways, and that’s fine, too.”
It’s “surreal,” Schutz said, to see so much homegrown talent coalesce around the project.
“All these great minds — from here — want to collaborate and help and do this big thing,” she said.