CT Scans of Health Wearables

Posted by radeeyate 13 hours ago

CT Scans of Health Wearables(www.lumafield.com)

191 points | 41 comments

robmusial 12 hours ago|

The entire library of scans on this site is great. It gives me a similar feeling as being a kid and playing around in 'The Way Things Work'[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Nz1y7Sj74

jcims 11 hours ago||

mikeselectricstuff on YouTube did a teardown on the Omnipod wearable pump a while back, very cool mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2MQUUkubgs

Insulin is incredibly potent and can easily result in life-altering if not fatal consequences at relatively low ratios of the therapeutic dose, so these things need to be dialed in and extremely reliable.

Aurornis 10 hours ago||

YouTube teardowns from knowledgeable engineers are a gold mine for learning how real world products are engineered. I always recommend these for early career hardware students and engineers.

mlsu 7 hours ago|||

What's so wild (and a little disheartening) is that the omnipod is a disposable device. Use it for several days, and throw it out.

This is an extreme corner of quality/cost/reliability optimization. The delivery mechanism has to be extremely repeatable and reliable, it has to fail in safe ways, but at the same time, it has to be cheap enough to throw away.

Durable pumps are all made with very expensive precision mechanisms, lots of metal and high quality plastic.

chiph 6 hours ago||

A friend's coworker had their pump lock on, and inject the entire reservoir of insulin into them. They were discovered in their home by the police after family members lost contact. No idea if it was an Omnipod, but I would hope that all insulin pumps have a separate watchdog circuit to prevent this.

stevezsa8 4 hours ago||

Did they survive?

sllabres 7 hours ago||

It's always interesting to see how are things build in the Lumafields "Scan of the month". The the most interesting scan from Lumafield I saw was not a Scan of the month, but in "Adam Savage’s Tested: Surprising Flaws in 18650 Lithium-Ion Batteries" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y23nfAOiXQ

PS: Nice company logo btw. ;)

nerdsniper 8 hours ago||

I know people from Lumafield read these comments occasionally, and I'm grateful for all of this!

Why is the Omnipod available[0] to explore in Voyager, but the Dexcom is not? I'd like to send links to both for my diabetic girlfriend to enjoy, who uses those two particular devices.

0: https://voyager.lumafield.com/project/16d13f1d-58f5-4572-b2a...

tlb 7 hours ago||

Great images, OK writeup. There are some bits of bullshit, like "The proximity of microphones to processing hardware minimizes latency". No, the speed of electrical signal propagation (around 2/3 the speed of light) is not significant for microphone placement.

anonymous_user9 4 minutes ago|

It's AI slop. The descriptions are all meaninglessly specific like that, saying things that are technically true but don't make sense to point out.

cindyllm 3 minutes ago||

[dead]

hyperific 12 hours ago||

Glad they're still doing these. I really enjoyed Scan of the Month and then they just stopped doing new scans after the Moka Pot.

skyberrys 10 hours ago||

The custom Lipo battery with thermal effects and weight considered is really beautiful to see. I've been curious about custom Lipo battery shapes for rings because my fingers get cold when I wear rings. Would a battery heating up just a bit help make that comfortable for me?

mikestew 10 hours ago||

Would a battery heating up just a bit help make that comfortable for me?

In something ring-sized? Maybe for about five minutes, and then the battery dies. (I assume you mean using resistive elements to create heat; heating the actual battery seems like a bad idea.)

skyberrys 4 hours ago||

My bad, I read the article wrong, they are only concerned with thermal heating while it's charging. I did seem unexpected that a ring could heat up enough to be a concern while being worn.

Terr_ 9 hours ago|||

> my fingers get cold when I wear rings

Unless the ring is shaped as a heatsink/radiator, I imagine it would eventually get into equilibrium, and you wouldn't feel the heat-flux.

Is it possible that the "coldness" comes from its indirect affect on blood-circulation?

skyberrys 4 hours ago||

Yes I think you are right and also fingers tend to swell and shrink with heat and cold so the ring that fits nicely in a cooler room will restrict circulation slightly once I'm feeling warmer, leaving me with one cold ring wearing finger.

DJBunnies 8 hours ago||

A battery. Which can catch fire. Around your finger?

skyberrys 4 hours ago||

Phones catch fire and men tend to stick them in the front pant pocket. But yes true, so far I haven't gotten into smart jewelry. I was pretty into jewelry for a while but never rings because of the cold finger situation. Necklaces can be problematic too. I chipped my front tooth slightly when I jumped wearing a big crystal and smacked myself in the face with it.

paulwetzel 11 hours ago||

Really love these scans! I would love to have on of these at home, just to tinker with devices and understand how they work. Then I usually want to check the price, see "Talk to sales" an decide probably not the price range that is good for private use. Nonetheless, great articles and an amazing device.

mikestew 11 hours ago|

I’m sure there’s the small issue of radiological safety as well. Obviously one can be trained to not fry yourself with x-rays, but I wouldn’t, say, pick one up off Aliexpress and have at it.

eichin 7 hours ago||

Some of their earlier videos go into a lot of detail on the safety interlocks (including that the radiation near the device can be lower than ambient because it's basically a large chunk of shielding :-)

As for pricing, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392896 had some numbers from 5 months ago. It seems like the kind of thing that you'd want as a nearby service, unless you needed to do continuous inspection (they have some automated conveyor sampling products too, it looks like.) My last company had a few 3d-printed components that would have been interesting to spot check after wear testing, but for a lot of things, the competition for the scan is "open it up with a screwdriver" :-)

throwway120385 7 hours ago||

I bet it's something you can lease with a traceable calibration certificate.

pants2 6 hours ago||

San Diego is really a hub for health wearables! Tijuana to an extent too.

Oura - based in SD.

Dexcomm - based in SD.

Omnipod/Insulet - major R&D hub in SD & TJ.

pedalpete 6 hours ago|

Oura is headquartered in Oulu Finland and the main US office is in SF.

San Diego does have a bunch of health tech, but it pales in comparison to Boston.

bonsai_spool 6 hours ago||

> San Diego does have a bunch of health tech, but it pales in comparison to Boston.

I don't have firm data on this, but colloquially among medical people, San Diego is seen to have more biotech startups than any other metro, including Boston/SF.

Boston has more research, of course, though SD is competitive there as well.

We can disagree about numbers etc, but 'pales' doesn't reflect reality.

edit: https://www.cbre.com/insights/local-response/global-life-sci... -- support for it being an important life science market

fapjacks 1 hour ago||

I have worked in tech in many different cities and when I worked for a startup in San Diego, we were surrounded by health tech companies of all sizes. I've never worked in Boston, but I would say San Diego is definitely a health tech hub.

perdomon 7 hours ago|

still not into scroll-jacking, but these breakdowns were well-written and documented.

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