a very slapdash x-ray machine on a table

Building An X-Ray Machine

September 9, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 57 Comments

While we typically encourage hackers to make their own tools or machines when practical, x-ray machines don’t usually make that list. Despite the risk of radiation, [William Osman] has done just that and built a homemade x-ray machine. After receiving an eye-watering medical bill, [William] resolves to make his own x-ray machine in the hopes of avoiding future bills. Thanks to his insurance, the total owed was smaller but still ridiculous to those who live in single-payer health care countries, but it got William thinking. What if he could make an x-ray machine to do cheap x-rays?

Armed with a cheap high voltage DC power supply he acquired from an online auction house, he started to power up his x-ray vacuum tube. A smaller power supply energizes the cathode and forms an electron beam. Then the high voltage (30-150kv) is applied as a tube voltage, accelerating the electrons into x-rays. Safety measures are taken somewhat haphazardly with Geiger counters and lead sheets. With a finger bone cast in ballistic shell [William] made his first x-ray with a long exposure on a DSLR. The next items to go in the x-ray “chamber” were a phone and a hand. The results were actually pretty decent and you can clearly see the bones.

We’ve seen homemade X-Ray machines here at Hackaday before, but not one that is constructed perhaps so haphazardly — his approach makes this obvious: don’t try this at home. Video after the break.

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Dyson Award Goes To Emergency Medical Device For Treating Stab Wounds

August 29, 2021 by Al Williams 68 Comments

[Joseph Bentley] must be one of those people who sees opportunity in problems. He had several friends who were victims of knife attacks, so he developed REACT, a device that would allow police or other first responders to quickly help victims of stab wounds. The project won the Dyson award and you can see the video about it, below.

The device has two parts: a medical-grade silicone sleeve and a handheld actuator. The sleeve actually inserts into the stab wound and the actuator pressurizes the sleeve based on the location of the wound. The actuator has a user interface to allow the operator to select the area of the body affected.

We don’t know much about emergency medicine, but apparently, the current method is to apply pressure externally and this doesn’t do much for internal bleeding. The sleeve solves that and [Bentley] thinks the device can save many lives if brought to market. Of course, getting a medical device actually on the market is a long road fraught with regulatory peril. We hope the Dyson award will help [Bentley] get the product in the hands of people who can use it to good purpose.

We are very interested in replacing damaged body parts, but saving people from losing body parts or life is good, too. Sometimes, just calling for help is worthwhile.

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DIY Machine Enables PEMF Therapy On A Budget

August 29, 2021 by Tom Nardi 48 Comments

We’re certainly not qualified to say whether or not pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) therapy will actually reduce your stress or improve your circulation, but there seems to be enough legitimate research going on out there that it might be worth a shot. After all, unless you’ve got a pacemaker or other medical implant, it seems pretty unlikely a magnetic field is going to make anything worse. Unfortunately commercial PEMF machines can cost thousands of dollars, making it a fairly expensive gamble.

But what if you could build one for as little as $10 USD? That’s the idea behind the simple DIY PEMF machine [mircemk] has been working on, and judging by its ability to launch bits of metal in the video below, we’re pretty confident it’s indeed producing a fairly powerful electromagnetic field. Even if it doesn’t cure what ails you, it should make an interesting conversation piece around the hackerspace.

While the outside of the machine might look a bit imposing, the internals really are exceptionally straightforward. There’s an old laptop power supply providing 19 VDC, a dual-MOSFET board, a potentiometer, and a simple signal generator. The pulses from the signal generator trip the MOSFET, which in turn dumps the output of the laptop power supply into a user-wound coil. [mircemk] has a 17 cm (6.7 inch) open air version wrapped with 200 turns of copper wire used for treating wide areas, and an 8 cm (3 inch) diameter version with 300 windings for when you need more targeted energy.

Some skepticism is always in order with these sort of medicinal claims, but commercial PEMF machines do get prescribed to users to help promote bone growth and healing, so the concept itself is perhaps not as outlandish as it might seem.

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Universal Bio-Electrical Signal Amplifier Makes Reading Body Signals Easy

August 26, 2021 by Robin Kearey 18 Comments

The electrical signals emitted by the human body tell us a lot about what’s going on inside. But getting those signals inside your microcontroller is not straightforward: the voltages are too small for most ADCs, and the ever-present 50 or 60 Hz mains frequency makes it hard to discern subtle changes. Over at Upside Down Labs, [Deepak Kathri] developed a universal biosensor interface called the BioAmp EXG Pill to make all this a lot easier.

Its name refers to the fact that it can be used for several different bio-electrical sensing applications: ECG, EMG, EOG and EEG, which deal with signals coming from the heart, muscles, eyes and brain, respectively. To enable such flexibility, the board has connectors for two or three electrodes, as well as solder pads to mount resistors and capacitors to adjust the gain and bandwidth. An instrumentation amplifier increases the strength of the desired signal while rejecting noise and interference.

The form factor allows easy connection to electrodes on one side and a data acquisition system on the other. Measuring just 25.4 mm long and 10 mm wide, it should be easy to integrate into any type of biosensing gizmo you can come up with. [Deepak] has made several demo setups, showing him using the Pill with an Arduino to measure his heart rate, detect eye blinks, and even control a robot arm using his own arm muscles!

The EXG Pill is an evolution of an earlier EMG-only project. We’ve seen several great ECG and EEG projects before, but is the first time we’ve seen one amplifier that can do them all.

Open-Source Insulin: Biohackers Aiming For Distributed Production

August 23, 2021 by Dan Maloney 74 Comments

When you’ve got a diabetic in your life, there are few moments in any day that are free from thoughts about insulin. Insulin is literally the first coherent thought I have every morning, when I check my daughter’s blood glucose level while she’s still asleep, and the last thought as I turn out the lights, making sure she has enough in her insulin pump to get through the night. And in between, with the constant need to calculate dosing, adjust levels, add corrections for an unexpected snack, or just looking in the fridge and counting up the number of backup vials we have on hand, insulin is a frequent if often unwanted intruder on my thoughts.

And now, as my daughter gets older and seeks like any teenager to become more independent, new thoughts about insulin have started to crop up. Insulin is expensive, and while we have excellent insurance, that can always change in a heartbeat. But even if it does, the insulin must flow — she has no choice in the matter. And so I thought it would be instructional to take a look at how insulin is made on a commercial scale, in the context of a growing movement of biohackers who are looking to build a more distributed system of insulin production. Their goal is to make insulin affordable, and with a vested interest, I want to know if they’ve got any chance of making that goal a reality.

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Tiny ball magnets implanted in muscles could provide much better control over prosthetics.

Magnets Could Give Prosthetic Control A Leg Up

August 21, 2021 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

Today, prostheses and exoskeletons are controlled using electromyography. In other words, by recording the electrical activity in muscles as they contract. It’s neither intuitive nor human-like, and it really only shows the brain’s intent, not the reality of what the muscle is doing.

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have figured out a way to use magnets for much more precise control, and they’re calling it magnetomicrometry (MM). By implanting pairs of tiny ball magnets and tracking their movement with magnetic sensors, each muscle can be measured individually and far more accurately than with electromyography.

After embedding pairs of 3mm diameter ball magnets into the calves of turkeys, the researchers were able to detect muscle movement in three milliseconds, and to the precision of thirty-seven microns, which is about the width of a human hair. They hope to try MM on humans within the next couple of years. It would be a great solution overall if it works out, because compared with the electromyography method, MM is cheaper, less invasive, and potentially permanent. Couple MM with a new type of amputation surgery called AMI that provides a fuller range of motion, less pain overall, and finer control of prosthetics, and the future of prostheses and rehabilitation looks really exciting. Be sure to check out the video after the break.

There’s more than one way to control prostheses, such as deep learning and somatosensory stimulation.

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Cobbled together proof-of-concept vaccination verification system, showing a dot-matrix receipt printer, a webcam for QR code scanning, and an old laptop running the software

Manitoban Makes Open Software Demo Of Proprietary Vaccine Verification Systems

August 19, 2021 by Chris Lott 31 Comments

[Mark Jenkins] wasn’t impressed with the Covid 19 vaccination verification systems that restaurants in Manitoba are required to use. Patrons must present a QR code, which must be verified by a mobile app available only from Apple or Google. With help from his local hackerspace, he came up with a bash script solution requiring only kilobytes vs the 50 MB of the mobile apps. [Mark] isn’t pleased with the exclusivity of the apps availability and the lack of an open API. His concern isn’t entirely theoretical, either — Google mysteriously pulled their app from the Play Store for over a week.

The interim result, shown in the video below, is a demonstration system called Alexandra. It consists of a receipt printer, a webcam being used as a QR scanner, and a 2005-era laptop running the script. This is merely a proof of concept, as [Mark] clearly notes. There is still some work to be done — for example, the method used to authenticate with the Google server is transient. But eventually [Mark] hopes to have a free software alternative soon, suitable for restaurant owners to use in their establishments.

What kinds of vaccination verifications systems, if any, are used in your part of the world? Is the system open or proprietary? Let us know in the comments below.

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