Social Innovation
How one man and a therapeutic handheld ball are helping to improve the lives of people suffering from debilitating diseases.
As a child growing up in Lithuania, Dr. Mantas Venslauskas watched his friends and family struggle with crippling illnesses, dreaming of ways he could help to make their lives better.
“My grandfather was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and my friend in high school had hand tremors,” Venslauskas explains. “I saw how difficult it is to cope with shaking hands. And when you see people living with these problems every day, you want to help them somehow.”
After adding a PhD in mechanical engineering to his bachelor’s degree in sports engineering, Venslauskas started his career by working on devices that could improve wellness, from monitoring heart rates to measuring reaction times and physical activity.
The desire to help people like his grandfather never disappeared, however, and the tech and engineering background would provide a solid footing for Venslauskas to create the ViLim Ball in 2017. Venslauskas had hit on an idea that could help people suffering from Parkinson’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
Together, the two illnesses affect up to 88 million people worldwide, with rheumatoid arthritis alone estimated by the Rheumatoid Arthritis Support Network to affect up to one percent of the world’s population. There’s currently no cure for either disease, but ViLim Ball can help.
“I was always interested in various gadgets and technological solutions for people in sports or medicine,” says Venslauskas. He was particularly interested in alternative Japanese healthcare, which led him to the discovery of Katsuzo Nishi, the Japansese founder of the Nishi-Shiki health system.
“Nishi-Shiki provides a number of exercises for the treatment of circulatory disorders,” Venslauskas explains. “Nishi stated that the capillaries provide the true driving force of the circulatory system. To compensate for the obstruction of circulation in a human’s limbs he proposed the capillarity exercise which principles were based on hands and legs shaking while laying down. So I thought, it would be interesting to create something that would enable people get benefits from this exercise without making much effort.”
That something was ViLim Ball. The handheld therapeutic device uses vibrations to help alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
“The device’s working principles are based on vibrational therapy,” says Venslauskas. “We gathered evidence to show that 10 minutes of therapy can reduce hand tremor for a period up to four hours, while early validation shows up to 50 percent of tremor reduction for more than 80 percent of the patients.”
So far, Venslauskas has worked with more than 200 patients in clinical tests at the Hospital of Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Kaunas Clinics. And although the device is still undergoing trials for medical approval, the ViLim Ball has been available to buy since 2018, helping Venslauskas and his team to monitor how it’s performing during everyday life.
Rita is just one of the people to find relief through the ViLim Ball, and she explains:
“My husband was diagnosed with essential tremor (hand shaking) by doctors, and there are no effective drugs. The ViLim Ball is just a salvation. He uses it daily two to three times for 10 minutes, and after that his hands tremble less, he has better coordination, he can move and eat more easily.”
There’s even a new version in the pipeline, adding an accelerometer and gyroscope to the design. Venslauskas points out that the sensors will be able to monitor tremor levels and adapt and personalise the way the ball vibrates, making it more effective for individual treatment.
In the meantime, the challenge continues as Venslauskas and his team work to bring the latest ViLim Ball to market. “We want to finalise the technical parts, the design and packaging, and submit a worldwide patent application by the end of April,” he explains. “We’ll then be taking all the necessary steps to attain medical device compliance (CE Class IIa) by the end of 2019.”