The PediSedate: A Winning Combination Of Video Games And Anesthesia

December 17, 2025 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

One can understand that it would be nice to have something to focus on while trying to remain calm ahead of a medical procedure. Credit: PediSedate

Once upon a time, surgery was done on patients who were fully conscious and awake. As you might imagine, this was a nasty experience for all involved, and particularly the patients. Eventually, medical science developed the techniques of anaesthesia, which allowed patients to undergo surgery without feeling pain or even being conscious of it at all.

Adults are typically comfortable in the medical environment and tolerate anaesthesia well. For children, though, the experience can be altogether more daunting. Thus was invented the PediSedate—a device which was marketed almost like a Game Boy accessory intended to deliver anaesthetic treatment in order to safely and effectively prepare children for surgery.

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Smart Bandage Leverages AI Model For Healing Purposes

November 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 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.

Fixing Human Sleep With Air Under Pressure

July 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 68 Comments

By and large, the human body is designed to breathe from birth, and keep breathing continuously until death. Indeed, if breathing stops, lifespan trends relatively rapidly towards zero. There’s a whole chunk of the brain and nervous system dedicated towards ensuring oxygen keeps flowing in and carbon dioxide keeps flowing out.

Unfortunately, the best laid plans of our body often go awry. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition in which a person’s airways become blocked by the movement of soft tissues in the throat, preventing the individual from breathing. It’s a mechanical problem that also has a mechanical solution—the CPAP machine.

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Hackaday Links: June 29, 2025

June 29, 2025 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

In today’s episode of “AI Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” we feature the Hertz Corporation and its new AI-powered rental car damage scanners. Gone are the days when an overworked human in a snappy windbreaker would give your rental return a once-over with the old Mark Ones to make sure you hadn’t messed the car up too badly. Instead, Hertz is fielding up to 100 of these “MRI scanners for cars.” The “damage discovery tool” uses cameras to capture images of the car and compares them to a model that’s apparently been trained on nothing but showroom cars. Redditors who’ve had the displeasure of being subjected to this thing report being charged egregiously high damage fees for non-existent damage. To add insult to injury, if renters want to appeal those charges, they have to argue with a chatbot first, one that offers no path to speaking with a human. While this is likely to be quite a tidy profit center for Hertz, their customers still have a vote here, and backlash will likely lead the company to adjust the model to be a bit more lenient, if not outright scrapping the system.

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Little Pharma On The Prairie

September 24, 2024 by Brian McEvoy 53 Comments

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first — in his DEFCON 32 presentation, [Dr. Mixæl Laufer] shared quite a bit of information on how individuals can make and distribute various controlled substances. This cuts out pharmaceutical makers, who have a history of price-gouging and discontinuing recipes that hurt their bottom line. We predict that the comment section will be incendiary, so if your best argument is, “People are going to make bad drugs, so no one should get to have this,” please disconnect your keyboard now. You would not like the responses anyway.

Let’s talk about the device instead of policy because this is an article about an incredible machine that a team of hackers made on their own time and dime. The reactor is a motorized mixing vessel made from a couple of nested Mason jars, surrounded by a water layer fed by hot and cold reservoirs and cycled with water pumps. Your ingredients come from three syringes and three stepper-motor pumps for accurate control. The brains reside inside a printable case with a touchscreen for programming, interaction, and alerts.

It costs around $300 USD to build a MicroLab, and to keep it as accessible as possible, it can be assembled without soldering. Most of the cost goes to a Raspberry Pi and three peristaltic pumps, but if you shop around for the rest of the parts, you can deflate that price tag significantly. The steps are logical, broken up like book chapters, and have many clear pictures and diagrams. If you want to get fancy, there is room to improvise and personalize. We saw many opportunities where someone could swap out components, like power supplies, for something they had lying in a bin or forego the 3D printing for laser-cut boards. The printed pump holders spell “HACK” when you disassemble them, but we would have gone with extruded aluminum to save on filament.

Several times [⁨Mixæl] brings up the point that you do not have to be a chemist to operate this any more than you have to be a mechanic to drive a car. Some of us learned about SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System) from this video, and with that elementary level of chemistry, we feel confident that we could follow a recipe, but maybe for something simple first. We would love to see a starter recipe that combines three sodas at precise ratios to form a color that matches a color swatch, so we know the machine is working correctly; a “calibration cocktail,” if you will.

If you want something else to tickle your chemistry itch, check out our Big Chemistry series or learn how big labs do automated chemistry.

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What Can We Do With These Patient Monitor Videos?

August 7, 2023 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

So we’ll admit from the start that we’re not entirely sure how the average Hackaday reader can put this content to use. Still, these simulated patient monitor videos on YouTube gotta be useful for something. Right?

Uploaded by [themonitorsolution], each fourteen-minute 1080p video depicts what a patient monitor would look like in various situations, ranging from an adult in stable condition to individuals suffering from ailments such as COPD and sepsis. There’s even one for a dead patient, which makes for rather morbid watching.

Now we assume these are intended for educational purposes — throw them up on a display and have trainees attempt to diagnose what’s wrong with the virtual patient. But we’re sure clever folks like yourselves could figure out alternate uses for these realistic graphics. They could make for an impressive Halloween prop, or maybe they are just what you need to get that low-budget medical drama off the ground, finally.

Honestly, it seemed too cool of a resource not to point out. Besides, it’s exceedingly rare that we get to post a YouTube video that we can be confident none of our readers have seen before…at the time of this writing, the channel only has a single subscriber. Though with our luck, that person will end up being one of you lot.

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Blood Pressure Monitor For Under $1

June 20, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

Medical equipment is not generally known for being inexpensive, with various imaging systems usually weighing in at over a million dollars, and even relatively simpler pieces of technology like digital thermometers, stethoscopes, and pulse oximeters coming in somewhere around $50. As the general pace of technological improvement continues on we expect marginal decreases in costs, but every now and then a revolutionary piece of technology will drop the cost of something like a blood pressure monitor by over an order of magnitude.

Typically a blood pressure monitor involves a cuff that pressurizes against a patient’s arm, and measures the physical pressure of the blood as the heart forces blood through the area restricted by the cuff. But there are some ways to measure blood pressure by proxy, instead of directly. This device, a small piece of plastic with a cost of less than a dollar, attaches to a smartphone near the camera sensor and flashlight. By pressing a finger onto the device, the smartphone uses the flashlight and the camera in tandem to measure subtle changes in the skin, which can be processed in an app to approximate blood pressure.

The developers of this technology note that it’s not a one-to-one substitute for a traditional blood pressure monitor, but it is extremely helpful for those who might not be able to afford a normal monitor and who might otherwise go undiagnosed for high blood pressure. Almost half of adults in the US alone have issues relating to blood pressure, so just getting information at all is the hurdle this device is attempting to overcome. And, we’ll count it as a win any time medical technology becomes more accessible, more inexpensive, or more open-source.