DIY Vein viewing Device

The problem with veins:

I afraid of getting injections with syringes as it is a very painful experience. Unfortunately, for some people it is even more painful, if their veins are not clearly visible. In that case, usually nurses try to insert the needles into the body by guessing the vein’s position. Sometimes after three to four trails they have to change the spot and start to probe again for invisible veins. It’s particularly a problem for new born babies. Witnessing that needle punches itself is a painful experience.

Simple Solution:

One of the simplest solution to this problem is illuminating the veins by powerful LEDs. This solution relies on the fact that there is a change in colour of the blood, depending on whether it is carrying the oxygen or not. This change can be easily noticeable when veins are illuminated with red LEDs. By exploiting this fact, a company called veinlite made a device that consists of just LEDs (red and orange) and a battery to power them. It has been proved that this device works but it gets patented thus it costs $200 to $300. There are clones of this device, but they too cost ~$100, so these are not particularly affordable to most hospitals.

Open source version:

However, there is a nice guy called Alex, who made a open source version of veinlite and kindly shared the design files with instructions. Recently, I come across a friend who is suffering from this not so easily visible vein’s problem. Therefore, my friend’s hand was swollen and it’s really painful. So I attempted to build this vein viewer with the help of Uday. We just made a one small change to the original design of Alex, by adding a small potentiometer to adjust the brightness of the LEDs. Below are the few pics showing the build process and initial tests. I hope this will be useful to my friend. We didn’t have the exact switch used by Alex, so we adjusted the hole for the switch in the design accordingly. In the future, we will try the rechargeable battery version, if we find the cause. Please see the videos below to know, how it works.

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