Building A Heavy Duty Open Source Ventilator

August 28, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, we’ve seen several attempts to create homebrew ventilators designed to address the shortage of these lifesaving machines. Unfortunately, most hackers aren’t terribly experienced when it comes to designing practical medical equipment. So while many of the designs might have appeared functional on the workbench, there’s little chance they’d get used in any official capacity.

The open source DP Ventilator is still clearly the product of a couple plucky hackers, but we think it shows a level of design maturity that’s been missing in many of the earlier attempts. Made primarily with 3D printed components, this mechanical device is designed to operate a hand-held manual resuscitator; essentially standing in for a human operator. This makes the design far less complex than if it had to actually pump air itself, not to mention safer for the patient since the resuscitator (often referred to as an Ambu Bag) installed in it would be a sterile pre-packaged item.

In the video after the break, you can see just how much thought and effort has been put into the device’s touch screen interface. With a few quick taps the medical professional operating the DP Ventilator can dial in variables such as breathing rate, pressure, and volume to match the patient’s needs. While the Arduino Mega 2560 at the machine’s heart wouldn’t pass muster for any regulating body in charge of medical devices, we think with a few more tweaks, this design is getting close to something that might actually be able to save lives.

Continue reading “Building A Heavy Duty Open Source Ventilator” →

Assistive Gloves Come In Pairs

August 24, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 11 Comments

We have to hand it to this team, their entry for the 2020 Hackaday Prize is a classic pincer maneuver. A team from [The University of Auckland] in New Zealand and [New Dexterity] is designing a couple of gloves for both rehabilitation and human augmentation. One style is a human-powered prosthetic for someone who has lost mobility in their hand. The other form uses soft robotics and Bluetooth control to move the thumb, fingers, and an extra thumb (!).

The human-powered exoskeleton places the user’s hand inside a cabled glove. When they are in place, they arch their shoulders and tighten an artificial tendon across their back, which pulls their hand close. To pull the fingers evenly, there is a differential box which ensures pressure goes where it is needed, naturally. Once they’ve gripped firmly, the cables stay locked, and they can relax their shoulders. Another big stretch and the cords relax.

In the soft-robotic model, a glove is covered in inflatable bladders. One set spreads the fingers, a vital physical therapy movement. Another bladder acts as a second thumb for keeping objects centered in the palm. A cable system draws the fingers closed like the previous glove, but to lock them they evacuate air from the bladders, so jamming layers retain their shape, like food in a vacuum bag.

We are excited to see what other handy inventions appear in this year’s Hackaday Prize, like the thumbMouse, or how about more assistive tech that uses hoverboards to help move people?

Continue reading “Assistive Gloves Come In Pairs” →

Facing The Coronavirus

August 22, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 1 Comment

Some of us are oblivious to how often we touch our faces. The current finding is we reach for our eyes, nose, or mouth every three to four minutes. Twenty times per hour is an awful lot of poking, picking, itching, and prodding when we’re supposed to keep our hands away from glands that can transmit and receive disease. To curb this habit and enter the 2020 Hackaday Prize, [Lloyd lobo] built a proof-of-concept device that sounds the alarm when you reach for your face.

We see an Arduino Uno connected to the classic HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, an LED, and we have to assume a USB battery pack. [Lloyd] recommends the smaller Nano, we might reach for the postage-stamp models and swap the ultrasonic module out for the much smaller laser time of flight sensor. At its soul, this is an intruder alarm. Instead of keeping siblings out of your room, you will be keeping your hands out of the area below the bill of the hat where the sensor is mounted. If you regularly lift a coffee cup to your lips, it might chastise you, and if you chew sunflower seeds, you might establish a tempo. *crunch* *chip* *beep* *crunch* *chip* *beep*

We have reviewed technology to improve our habits like a bracelet that keeps a tally, and maybe there is a book that will help shirk some suboptimal behaviors.

Continue reading “Facing The Coronavirus” →

Open Exosuit Project Helps Physically Challenged Put One Foot In Front Of Another

August 18, 2020 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Humans make walking look simple, but of course that’s an illusion easily shattered by even small injuries. Losing the ability to walk has an enormous impact on every part of your day, so rehabilitative advances are nothing short of life-changing. The Open Exosuit for Differently Abled project is working feverishly on their Hackaday Prize entry to provide a few different layers of help in getting people back on their feet.

We’ve seen a number of exosuit projects in the past, and all of them struggle in a few common places. It’s difficult to incorporate intuitive user control into these builds, and quite important that they stay out of the way of the user’s own balance. This one approaches those issues with the use of a walker that both provides a means of steadying one’s self, and facilitates sending commands to the exosuit. Using the OLED screen and buttons incorporated on the walker, the user can select and control the walking, sitting, and standing modes.

The exoskeleton is meant to provide assistance to people with weakness or lack of control. They still walk and balance for themselves, but the hope is that these devices will be an aid at times when human caregivers are not available and the alternative would be unsteady mobility or complete loss of mobility. Working with the assistive device has the benefit of continuing to make progress in strengthening on the march to recovery.

The team is hard at work on the design, and with less than two weeks left before the entry deadline of the 2020 Hackaday Prize, we’re excited to see where the final push will bring this project!

Continue reading “Open Exosuit Project Helps Physically Challenged Put One Foot In Front Of Another” →

Teardown: Orthofix SpinalStim

August 5, 2020 by Tom Nardi 56 Comments

If you’ve ever had a particularly nasty fracture, your doctor may have prescribed the use of an electronic bone growth stimulator. These wearable devices produce a pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) around the bone, which has been shown to speed up the natural healing process in a statistically significant number of patients. That’s not to say there isn’t a debate about how effective they actually are, but studies haven’t shown any downsides to the therapy, so it’s worth trying at least.

When you receive one of these devices, it will be programmed to only operate for a certain amount of time or number of sessions. Once you’ve “used up” the bone stimulator, it’s functionally worthless. As you might imagine, there’s no technical reason this has to be the case. The cynic would say the only reason these devices have an expiration date on them is because the manufacturer wants to keep them from hitting the second hand market, but such a debate is perhaps outside the scope of these pages.

The Orthofix SpinalStim you’re seeing here was given to me by a friend after their doctor said the therapy could be cut short. This provided a somewhat rare opportunity to observe the device before it deactivated itself, which I’d hoped would let me take a closer look at how it actually operated.

As you’ll soon see, things unfortunately didn’t work out that way. But that doesn’t mean the effort was fruitless, and there may yet be hope for hacking these devices should anyone feel like taking up the challenge.

Continue reading “Teardown: Orthofix SpinalStim” →

COVID Tracing Apps: What Europe Has Done Right, And Wrong

August 3, 2020 by Elliot Williams 63 Comments

Europe has been in COVID-containment mode for the last month, in contrast to the prior three months of serious lockdown. Kids went back to school, in shifts, and people went on vacation to countries with similarly low infection rates. Legoland and the zoo opened back up, capped at 1/3 capacity. Hardware stores and post offices are running “normally” once you’ve accommodated mandatory masks and 1.5 meter separations while standing in line as “normal”. To make up for the fact that half of the tables have to be left empty, most restaurants have sprawled out onto their terraces. It’s not really normal, but it’s also no longer horrible.

But even a country that’s doing very well like Germany, where I live, has a few hundred to a thousand new cases per day. If these are left to spread unchecked as before, the possibility of a second wave is very real, hence the mask-and-distance routine. The various European COVID-tracing apps were rolled out with this backdrop of a looming pandemic that’s tenuously under control. While nobody expects the apps to replace public distancing, they also stand to help if they can catch new and asymptomatic cases before they get passed on.

When Google and Apple introduced their frameworks for tracing apps, I took a technical look at them. My conclusion was that the infrastructure was sound, but that the implementation details would be where all of the dragons lay in wait. Not surprisingly, I was right!

Here’s an update on what’s happened in the first month of Europe’s experience with COVID-tracing apps. The good news is that the apps seem to be well written and based on the aforementioned solid foundation. Many, many people have installed at least one of the apps, and despite some quite serious growing pains, they seem to be mostly functioning as they should. The bad news is that, due to its privacy-preserving nature, nobody knows how many people have received warnings, or what effect, if any, the app is having on the infection rate. You certainly can’t see an “app effect” in the new daily cases rate. After a month of hard coding work and extreme public goodwill, it may be that cellphone apps just aren’t the panacea some had hoped.

Continue reading “COVID Tracing Apps: What Europe Has Done Right, And Wrong” →

Folding@Home And Rosetta, For ARM

August 2, 2020 by Jenny List 19 Comments

Most readers will be aware of the various distributed computing projects that provide supercomputer-level resources to researchers by farming out the computing tasks across a multitude of distributed CPUs and GPUs. The best known of these are probably Folding@Home and Rosetta, which have both this year been performing sterling service in the quest to understand the mechanisms of the SARS COVID-19 virus. So far these two platforms have remained available nearly exclusively for Intel-derived architectures, leaving the vast number of ARM-based devices out in the cold. It’s something the commercial distributed-computing-on-your-phone company Neocortix have addressed, as they have successfully produced ARM64 clients for both platforms that will be incorporated into the official clients in due course.

So it seems that mundane devices such as mobile phones and the more capable Raspberry Pi boards will now be able to fold proteins like a boss, and the overall efforts to deliver computational research will receive a welcome boost. But will there be any other benefits? It’s a Received Opinion that ARM chips are more power-efficient than their Intel-derived cousins, but will this deliver more energy-efficient distributed computing? The answer is “probably”, but the jury’s out on that one as computationally intensive tasks are said to erode the advantage significantly.

Folding@Home was catapulted by the influx of COVID-19 volunteers into first place as the world’s largest supercomputer earlier this year, and we’re pleased to say that Hackaday readers have played their part in that story. As this is being written the July 2020 stats show our team ranked at #39 worldwide, having racked up 14,005,664,882 points across 824,842 work units. Well done everybody, and we look forward to your ARM phones and other devices boosting that figure. If you haven’t done so yet, download the client and join us..

Via HPCwire. Thanks to our colleague [Sophi] for the tip.