Mononymous maker and scholar Kevin, of the YouTube channel DeepFriedPancake, has put a Raspberry Pi Pico W to work as a nerve stimulation machine — with a view to hopefully decreasing the tics attributable to Tourette’s syndrome.
“I’ve Tourette’s syndrome, which principally signifies that my mind leacks extreme alerts inflicting me to do involuntary actions referred to as ‘tics,'” Kevin explains. “These embody spilling out noises, offensive sentences, gestures, swinging my arms or cracking my joints. Earlier than I do an motion, there’s a premonition urge just like a sneeze or an itch; one of many internal components of my mind floods the movement management heart, going ‘you need to do that motion,’ and if I attempt to ignore the urge it will simply occupy my ideas till I execute that motion.”
Impressed by a paper printed by researchers on the College of Nottingham final 12 months, a preprint of which is accessible on medRxiv beneath open-access phrases, Kevin determined to undertake a technological salve for the issue: a median nerve stimulation system, which injected rhythmic 10-12Hz pulses into the topic’s nervous system — ensuing, the group discovered, in a measurable discount in tics among the many trial group.
Kevin’s try to copy the group’s outcomes facilities round a Raspberry Pi Pico W improvement board and its RP2040 microcontroller, which serves as the guts of the homebrew transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) system. A 9V battery is boosted to 40V by way of a step-up converter, then fed right into a half-bridge driver that in flip delivers the voltage to the person by way of electrode pad positioned alongside the median nerve. Every part is managed by way of a smartphone over Bluetooth.
Kevin’s creation makes use of electrodes designed for a industrial TENS machine related to an H-bridge driver and a step-up converter, managed by a Raspberry Pi Pico W. (📷: DeepFriedPancake)
“That is under no circumstances a rigorous or formal medical experiment,” Kevin admits, “it’s extra qualitative and subjective based mostly on my emotions. [But] you may see a form of important discount within the quantity of tic situations [with the device]. When it comes to subjective feeling, I additionally really feel fairly in a different way once I’m making use of the heart beat — I really feel extra at-ease and fear much less about having the urge to tic, although this is also a placebo impact.”
The undertaking is documented in full within the video embedded above and on Kevin’s YouTube channel, DeepFriedPancake.