The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.

A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.

So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.

It is more than that. In previous studies from the authors they have controlled for the nutritional content and the processing and found that the content itself, so carbs fats etc, have a certain amount of causal influence on health, but the processing also has a separate and significant effect. Just having less processing seems to have a meaningful effect. This means less of the additives like milk powder, xanthan gum, sweeteners, flavourings, extracts, and so on. The exact mechanism seems to vary depending on the specific case, but separating components of food and then remixing them as well as adding non food components and processing with heat and pressure seems to make these things no longer digestible and safe.

OK so I can definitely see why it would seem pointless or really narrow, but I think this would have actually been very helpful for me and people like me. I have dyspraxia, a coordination disability. Mine is specifically graphomotor, meaning the exact types of movements involved in writing. My handwriting was absolutely terrible, causing pain in my hands (I also had incomplete hand dominance, so yay, both hands sucked equally), inability to express in a written form, and difficulty with tasks like painting, drawing, sewing, and cooking. Over the years the most helpful things were gaining strength and switching to printing only, no running writing at all.

If this tool could help with increasing the feedback from my hands to my brain and also push my fingers through the shapes of letters I think I would have had some benefit. I think people who have had a stroke may also potentially benefit, though obviously it would need thorough testing.