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Comment by gottebp | Hacker News Reader

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1].

It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer.

It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough.

I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in.

Do other founders feel this way? I wish I understood it better.

[1] https://steadymouse.com

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I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and random things happen. :-)

Your software looks amazing for me! Your web site describes my situation exactly. It looks like it's Windows only? Any plans for a Mac version?

Edit: I accidentally posted a truncated version of this earlier (I deleted it), exactly because of my tremor!

The FAQ suggests a MacOS port is “underway:”

https://www.steadymouse.com/faq/

Same here. Mine isn't debilitating (yet, maybe). But there are definitely times it's a real pain, and nobody really seems to understand what it's like to have. And in public it gets annoying because older people will come up to me sometimes and tell me "did you know / do you know if you have Parkinson's" even though it's ET.

Your mileage may vary, but I had the same issue and it got fixed after I started lifting and developed more muscle all over my body, especially in the core.

It’s like the nervous system can’t just jerk my hand around if there is more muscle for it to control.

Now my firearm accuracy makes everyone jealous at the range, people are like “wow, you’re such a natural”.

I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call and email pretty much every doctor around the world who knew anything about ET and after many emails and phone calls I found a surgeon in South Korea and Florida who agreed to see him. A few months later they performed a non-invasive brain operation that totally cured the ET in his dominant hand (they couldn’t do both). It saved his life.

Can you elaborate on what the non-invasive brain operation was?

Non-invasive wow! Could you provide more details on it?

I'm interested, too, but it might be a loose term - sometimes people say "non-invasive" to mean "minimally-invasive" or such. So something that involves opening the skull and placing electrodes on the surface of the brain can be considered "non-invasive" to the brain matter, and endoscopic endonasal surgery is much less invasive than going through the skull.

In fact, "non-invasive operation" is oxymoronic, because an operation or surgery is a medical treatment that is invasive.

Deep brain stimulation. Brainwave entrainment. This is technology that really should be talked about more. Look it up on Google Scholars to see the research and results it has on many things such as, sleep disorders, concentration, learning, even found to reverse Alzhiemsers. It is so simple you can treat yourself from your cell phone. Deep brain stimulation is the same only they use magnetic pulses. Please look this up.

Any idea what causes this?

I'm curious. Would some sort of intentionally-activated eye tracking work? Do your eyes have tremors?

Ideally (there's a pun in there, but it's not intentional) we could use our eyes to signal where we want our "focus" to be, but only when we want that signaling to happen. So a simple button held to indicate "track my eyes and focus on where I'm looking when I lift the button" might be useful.

> It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in

My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.

Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.

My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.

I don't think you're right that society doesn't have canned responses for this sort of situation. There's no canned response as brief as "my condolences" or "I'm sorry for your loss", but combine a few vague phrases of the sort "what an awful situation", "it must be horrible to lose control over your body and mind like that" and something about how brave and kind the other person is for helping his grandfather like that, and most people are going to get through the conversation without too much discomfort.

It might sound like I'm being ironic, but even if these phrases are cliched and almost contentless in a strict sense, they're very useful for signalling purposes, and when you're talking to someone whose relative is sick or dead, being able to smoothly signal that you care is actually really good for both parties -- comforting for the recipient and convenient for the sender (in the sense that they can easily make their concern and care for the recipient clear without too much hassle).

Thanks for posting, a real inspiration.

This is peak development to me: to write high quality software to solve a problem I care about and make it available for others. If this sold zero copies, it would have all been worth it.

What about zero downloads?

I got steadymouse several years ago for my father when he developed parkinsons. It's been a huge benefit in his life. Thank you.

You should consider surrounding yourself with people that can tell the story. It's common to not be able or willing to tell your own story. Others can carry or lift this weight for you, and take it where it needs to go.

I would have loved to have had this for my grandfather when he was around.

In terms of marketing (if you’re not already doing it), you could write blog posts about different topics around Parkinson’s + tech use.

The use a tool like Surfer SEO to make sure you’ve covered the search term topic cluster well, and then more people will find it via Google.

Out of curiosity, did you consider creating a browser extension version of your software? As a developer of a dictation extension for Chrome [0] I see that it gets a lot of use for accessibility purposes.

I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it steady). This basic test seemed to hold up.

That could potentially open up a whole new market for you…? Just curious if you’ve considered this. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email too if this sounds interesting!

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictation-for-gmai...

Can you hook the mouse in a browser extension?

You can detect the location but no, you can't change the position of the pointer using Javascript.

you could draw a fake one

Exactly. You hide the native cursor with css and show an image on top of the page whose position you move around.

This would work visually but I think you'd run into a lot of edge cases where JS/CSS/the browser itself is expecting to hook into or access mouse APIs

Yeah, imagine fake mouse is clicking a Save-button, but real mouse is up in the corner clicking the browsers Close-button.

I agree, these questions are part of the work that would be required to take it from a prototype to something useable.

You could maybe add one big transparent layer on top of the page which would catch all "real" clicks and generate synthetic mouse events under the layer at the stabilized position.

Browsers aren't an "ideal" environment (versus an OS where you might be able to hook into the mouse position/display at a lower level), but at the same time, they are ubiquitious, cross-platform, etc.

Might be worth a shot to expand this more. It's on my long list of side projects -- I'd love to collab with someone on it!

After seeing this on HN at some point, I bought the software for a family member -- as far as I know, they're very happy with it! It's kind of a sore thing to talk about, so I haven't heard it said directly, but last I saw the software was still installed on the machine :)

I remember reading about this project a long time ago, congrats!

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you find hard to talk about?

This is awesome!

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