Hardware

Ojoshi at instructables.com has posted a manual on how to build this arduino based hearing aid system. From his instructables page: it has tuning functionality that allows the wearer to tune the amplification to his or her needs.

NeuroTinker project is all about hardware emulated neurons. The creators made them in a way that each hardware neuron has excitatory and inhibitory inputs and one output that can be split up to affect dowsntream neurons.

Ever thought about making soft robots? The folks at Super-Releaser have, and they are doing very cool projects! Some for medical applications and some for research purposes. Check one of their cool robots below:

The 5 dollar PCR machine is a project from David Ng. he created a very interesting design for the PCR machine. Instead of using eppendorfs, he is using teflon tubes and three different heating elements, which allows for cheaper (he has a working PCR machine for 5 dollars!

The Open bionics project was inspired by the Yale open hand project, aiming to develop light, affordable, and modular robot hands and myoelectric prosthesis. Also they want to make them easy to replicate using off the shelf materials.

With the rise of low cost 3D printers, and other cheap manufacturing tools, the field of robotics and prosthetics has been gaining quite a few open source projects. Two very nice compilations can be found at openrobot hardware and at Soft robotics toolkit.

Backyard brains started out producing low cost, portable, electrophysiology systems to bring neuroscience to classrooms and help promote it. “Backyard brains wants to be for neuroscience, what the telescope is for astronomers” – meaning that the idea is that with a couple of hundred dollars anyone can get one of these recording systems and start doing experiments, like amateur astronomers can buy telescopes and start observing the cosmos.

This neat little project uses some plexi-glass, lens extracted from a laser pointer to harvest the power of smartphone cameras for some very big amplifications! Yoshinok manged to see cell plasmolysis and some other cool features with it.

Attys is an wearable data acquisition device with a special focus on biomedical signals such as heart activity (ECG), muscle activity (EMG) and brain activity (EEG). It’s open firmware, open API and has open source applications on github in C++ and JAVA to encourage people to create their own custom versions for mobile devices, tablets and PC.

This project uses a 32X32 LED array (1024 LEDs in total) and a beagle bone black board. The page describing the project has very nice explanations on how the whole system works (and LED displays in general).