Smart Thermometer Can Tell Flu From Cold

June 26, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 20 Comments

Before the outbreak of coronavirus, the seasonal flu was one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, but a lot of people have trouble telling the difference between a flu and a cold by their symptoms alone. This gave [M. Bindhammer] the idea to design a smart thermometer that can distinguish between flu and cold.

Automated medical diagnostics is certainly an important technology of the future. [M. Bindhammer]’s project, named F°LUEX, is the second version of his iF°EVE thermometer. After taking the body temperature it asks the patient a set of questions about his symptoms and then calculates the probability of whether it is more likely to be a flu or a cold. [M. Bindhammer] uses a method commonly used in medical diagnostics based on Bayesian statistics which assigns a probability score to both hypotheses. It takes into account how often a certain symptom occurs when you have a common cold or flu as well as the overall probability of catching one or the other.

The hardware of the project is based on a custom PCB that includes a medical-grade MLX90614 infrared thermometer with an accuracy of ±0.2˚C around the human body temperature. The sensor is being read out by a Teensy 3.2 and information is displayed on a small OLED screen. Everything is housed in a 3D printed enclosure that received a nice finishing by painting with primer and acrylic spray paint. Unfortunately, [M. Bindhammer] project also got delayed by the corona crisis as his order for the temperature sensor got canceled due to the current high demand. But that does make us wonder how useful this could be to discriminate between cold, flu, and COVID-19.

An IR thermometer is something useful to have around not only for medical applications and can also be built without a custom PCB and minimal parts.

Teardown Of The Singaporean COVID-19 TraceTogether Token

June 25, 2020 by Maya Posch 63 Comments

A large part of fighting against the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the practice of contact tracing, where the whereabouts of an infected person can be traced and anyone who has been in contact with that person over the past days tested for COVID-19. While smartphone apps have been a popular choice for this kind of tracing, they come with a range of limitations, which is what the TraceTogether hardware token seeks to circumvent. Now [Sean “Xobs” Cross] has taken a look at the hardware that will be inside the token once it launches.

Recently, [Sean] along with [Andrew “bunnie” Huang] and a few others were asked by GovTech Singapore to review their TraceTogether hardware token proposal. At its core it’s similar to the Simmel contact tracing solution – on which both are also working – with contacts stored locally in the device, Bluetooth communication, and a runtime of a few months or longer on the non-rechargeable batteries.

The tracing protocol used is BlueTrace, which is an open application protocol aimed at digital contact tracing. It was developed by the Singaporean government, initially for use with their TraceTogether mobile app.

This smartphone app showed a number of issues. First is that Apple does not allow for iOS apps to use Bluetooth in the background, requiring the app to be active in the foreground to be useful. Apple has its own tracing protocol, but it does not cover the requirements for building a full contact graph, as [Andrew] covers in more detail. Finally, the app in general is not useful to those who do not have a recent (compatible) smartphone, or who do not have a smartphone at all.

A lot of the challenges in developing these devices lie in making them low-power, while still having the Bluetooth transceiver active often enough to be useful, as well as having enough space to store interactions and the temporary tokens that are used in the tracing protocol. As Simmel and the TraceTogether tokens become available over the coming months, it will be interesting to see how well these predictions worked out.

Wearable Device For Preventing SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death In Epilepsy)

June 22, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 13 Comments

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by the occurrence of seizures. Epilepsy can often prevent patients from living a normal life since it’s nearly impossible to predict when a seizure will occur. The unpredictability of the seizures makes performing tasks such as driving extremely dangerous. One of the challenges in treating epilepsy is the condition is still not very well understood.

Neurava, a recent startup company from Purdue University, aims to change this fact. Neurava is developing a neck wearable that “records key biological signals related to epilepsy.” None of the press releases we’ve found so far elaborate on what those biological signals are. Though we have some guesses of our own, we’ll leave it to the Hackaday community to speculate for the time being. One of the major hurdles in using biological signals to treat conditions like epilepsy both lies in the accuracy of the measurement itself in addition to how well the measurement correlates to the underlying condition. From the looks of it, Neurava has been working on this technology for a long time and are certainly more aware of these challenges than we are.

Neurava’s wearable includes a few other functionalities we’ve come to expect in this era of smart devices such as wireless data transmission to both the physician and patient, physician dashboard to monitor the patient’s progress over extended periods of time, and in-time alerts in the event a seizure is detected.

Neurava appears to have garnered a bit of publicity in these last few months and are currently securing seed money to help advance their technology. We’ll check in every so often to see how they’re doing.

A Properly Engineered UV Chamber For PPE Sanitization

June 16, 2020 by Dan Maloney 49 Comments

Designed to be used once and then disposed of, personal protective equipment (PPE) such as N95 face masks proved to be in such short supply during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that getting a few extra uses out of them by sanitizing them after a shift seemed smart. And so we saw a bunch of designs for sanitizing chambers, mostly based on UV-C light and mostly, sad to say, somewhat dodgy looking. This UV-C disinfection chamber, though, looks like a much better bet.

The link above is to the final installment of a nine-part series by [Jim] from Grass Roots Engineering. The final article has links to all the earlier posts, which go back [Jim]’s early research on UV-C sanitization methods back in March. This led him to settle on an aquarium sanitizer as his UV-C source. A second-hand ultraviolet meter allowed him to quantify the lamp’s output and plan how best to use it, which he did using virtual models of various styles of masks. Knowing that getting light on every surface of the mask is important, he designed a mechanism to move the mask around inside a reflective chamber. The finished chamber, which can be seen in the video below, is 3D-printed and looks like it means business, with an interlock for safety and a Trinket for control.

We love the level of detail [Jim] put into these posts and the thoughtful engineering approach he took toward this project. And we appreciate his careful testing, too — after all, it wouldn’t do to use a germicidal lamp that actually doesn’t emit UV-C.

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Notification Wearable Helps Get Child’s Attention

June 14, 2020 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Getting a child’s attention can be difficult at the best of times. Add deafness into the picture, and it’s harder again. [Jake]’s daughter recently had to go without her cochlear implants, raising this issue. Naturally, he whipped up some hardware to solve the problem.

[Jake]’s solution was to devise a vibrating wristband that could be used to get his daughter’s attention. An Adafruit Trinket M0 is used to vibrate a pager motor, using a DRV2605 motor driver. This is paired with a Tile Bluetooth device, allowing the unit to interface with Google Assistant. This allows [Jake] to get his daughter’s attention with a simple voice command to a smartphone, tablet or smart speaker.

While [Jake]’s daughter will regain her cochlear implants soon, they do have limitations as far as hearing distant sounds and working in high-noise environments. It’s likely that this little gadget will prove useful well into the future, and could serve others well, too. Wearable notification devices are growing more popular; this OLED ring is a particularly good example. Video after the break.

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Surviving The Pandemic As A Hacker: Making A Mask Of Your Very Own

June 10, 2020 by Jenny List 25 Comments

As the COVID-19 pandemic has continued along its way through the world, our community has responded as it always does, by designing and making things intended to solve the problems thrown up by the situation we find ourselves in. Much of this effort has gone into the production of PPE to plug the gap and many essential staff have been protected by maker-provided equipment, while the remainder of the effort has produced a wide array of clever designs for COVID-related items.

With curves flattened in many areas, Governments around the world are now encouraging the wearing of face masks in everyday social interactions. The purpose of mask for the general public is for droplet catching rather than virus filtering, and home made masks easily accomplish this. So let’s take a look at what you need to know about making a mast of your very own.

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