Medical Hacks

691 Articles

3D Printing And The Dream Of Affordable Prosthetics

December 1, 2025 by 7 Comments

As amazing as the human body is, it’s unfortunately not as amazing as e.g. axolotl bodies are, in the sense that they can regrow entire limbs and more. This has left us humans with the necessity to craft artificial replacement limbs to restore some semblance of the original functionality, at least until regenerative medicine reaches maturity.

Despite this limitation, humans have become very adept at crafting prosthetic limbs, starting with fairly basic prosthetics to fully articulated and beautifully sculpted ones, all the way to modern-day functional prosthetics. Yet as was the case a hundred years ago, today’s prosthetics are anything but cheap. This is mostly due to the customization  required as no person’s injury is the same.

When the era of 3D printing arrived earlier this century, it was regularly claimed that this would make cheap, fully custom prosthetics a reality. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened, for a variety of reasons. This raises the question of whether 3D printing can at all play a significant role in making prosthetics more affordable, comfortable or functional.

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3D printed jaw with fake muscle attached

3D Printing For The Hospital Setting

November 28, 2025 by 9 Comments

Surgery is hard, there is a reason why school is so long for the profession. Making the job easier and smoother for both patients and surgeons is valuable for all parties, which is why [Mayo Clinic] is now working on including 3D printing into its more regular medicine pipeline.

Prepping for surgery often requires examining CT scans of patients to figure out, well, what they’re even going to be doing. Every body is different, and complex surgical procedures require checking to see where certain organs or features are located. This can be made much easier with a physical model of where the bones, organs, or nerves are specifically located in a patient. While this isn’t true in every case of treatment, there are even cancerous cases where custom equipment can be used to decrease side effects, such as mini-beam collimator adapters.

What if you could use the same pipeline to print what was lost from certain procedures? In a mastectomy, the breast tissue is removed, which can cause negative attention from curious gazes. So why not 3D print a custom breast? Cases like these are generally considered poor commercial investments from industry, but are relatively easy for an existing medical facility to add to treatment.

[Mayo Clinic] is far from the first to consider 3D printing in the medical setting, but seeing the technology see actual applied use rather than future seeking is exciting. Medical hacking is always exciting, and if you want to see more examples, keep sure to check out this commercially available simulator (with some free models).

DIY TENS Machine Is A Pain-Relief PCB

November 22, 2025 by 36 Comments

Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) is one of those things that sounds like it must be woo when you first hear of it. “A trickle of current that can deal with chronic pain better than the pills we’ve been using for decades? Yeah, and what chakras do you hook this doo-hickie up to?” It seems too good to be true, but in fact it’s a well-supported therapy that has become part of scientific medicine. There are no crystals needed, and you’re applying electrodes to the effected area, not your chakras. Like all medical devices, it can be expensive if you have to buy the machine out-of-pocket… but it is just a trickle of current. [Leon Hillmann] shows us its well within the range of hackability, so why not DIY?

[Leon]’s TENS machine is specifically designed to help a relative with hand problems, so breaks out electrodes for each finger, with one on the palm serving as a common ground. This type of TENS is “monophasic”– that is, DC, which is easier than balancing current flowing in two directions through quivering flesh. The direct current is provided at 32 V to the digit electrodes, safely kept to a constant amperage with a transistor-based current limiting circuit. The common ground in the palm is pulsed at a rate set by an ATmega32U4 and thus controllable: 14 Hz is given as an example.

Obviously if you want to reproduce this work you’re doing it at your own risk and need to consult with relevant medical professionals (blah blah blah, caveat gluteus maximus) but this particular sort of medical device is a good fit for the average hacker. Aside from prosthetics, we haven’t seen that much serious medical hacking since the pandemic. Still, like with synthesizing medical drugs, this is the kind of thing you probably don’t want to vibe code.

Smart Bandage Leverages AI Model For Healing Purposes

November 19, 2025 by 14 Comments

If you get a small cut, you might throw a plastic bandage on it to help it heal faster. However, there are fancier options on the horizon, like this advanced AI-powered smart bandage.

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a proof-of-concept device called a-Heal, intended for use inside existing commercial bandages for colostomy use. The device is fitted with a small camera, which images the wound site every two hours. The images are then uploaded via a wireless connection, and processed with a machine learning model that has been trained to make suggestions on how to better stimulate the healing process based on the image input. The device can then follow these recommendations, either using electrical stimulation to reduce inflammation in the wound, or supplying fluoxetine to stimulate the growth of healthy tissue. In testing, the device was able to improve the rate of skin coverage over an existing wound compared to a control.

The long-term goal is to apply the technology in a broader sense to help better treat things like chronic or infected wounds that may have difficulty healing. It’s still at an early stage for now, but it could one day be routine for medical treatment to involve the use of small smart devices to gain a better rolling insight on the treatment of wounds. It’s not the first time we’ve explored innovative methods of wound care; we’ve previously looked at how treatments from the past could better inform how we treat in future.

Gene Therapy Aims To Slow Huntington’s Disease To A Crawl

November 11, 2025 by 22 Comments

Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, Huntington’s disease is a condition that still comes with a tragic prognosis. Primarily an inherited disease, its main symptoms concern degeneration of the brain, leading to issues with motor control, mood disturbance, with continued degradation eventually proving fatal.

Researchers have recently made progress in finding a potential treatment for the disease. A new study has indicated that an innovative genetic therapy could hold promise for slowing the progression of the disease, greatly improving patient outcomes.

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The Strange Depression Switch Discovered Deep Inside The Brain

November 10, 2025 by 49 Comments

As humans, we tend to consider our emotional states as a direct response to the experiences of our lives. Traffic may make us frustrated, betrayal may make us angry, or the ever-grinding wear of modern life might make us depressed.

Dig into the science of the brain, though, and one must realize that our emotional states are really just electrical signals zinging around our neurons. And as such, they can even be influenced by direct electrical stimulation.

One group of researchers found this out when they inadvertently discovered a “switch” that induced massive depression in a patient in mere seconds. For all the complexities of the human psyche, a little electricity proved more than capable of swaying it in an instant.

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Reshaping Eyeballs With Electricity, No Lasers Or Cutting Required

October 8, 2025 by 36 Comments

Glasses are perhaps the most non-invasive method of vision correction, followed by contact lenses. Each have their drawbacks though, and some seek more permanent solutions in the form of laser eye surgeries like LASIK, aiming to reshape their corneas for better visual clarity. However, these methods often involve cutting into the eye itself, and it hardly gets any more invasive than that.

A new surgical method could have benefits in this regard, allowing correction in a single procedure that requires no lasers and no surgical cutting of the eye itself. The idea is to use electricity to help reshape the eye back towards greater optical performance.

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