Glasses Allow Medical Practitioners To See Veins Through The Skin
This article is more than 2 years old
Ever wondered what your veins look like up close? Maybe not, but if you’ve ever had a nurse prod around your arm with a needle, searching for one of those elusive bluish pathways, you may have wished that they were easier to find. That’s where the Eyes-On Glasses work their magic: a nurse puts them on, and presto! X-ray vision — or at least, the ability to see those veins under the skin.
Evena Medical, located in Silicon Valley, specializes in imaging technology for medical professionals who need reliable and precise access to those pesky veins. The glasses, which can be worn with contacts or over conventional eyeglasses, use multi-spectral 3D imaging. The glasses have two cameras — the clear lens allows users to see the patient’s skin, while the cameras transpose an image of the veins in real time on top, allowing the user to see “through” the skin. The glasses are hard-wired to a microprocessor that the user wears on a belt, which provides the image processing capability. The glasses themselves are battery powered.
If that’s not cool enough, those cameras are connected to Bluetooth, wireless, or Wi-Fi so the images they pick up can be transmitted to medical staff elsewhere. The glasses also have two speakers that augment remote communication. And if that doesn’t work and a user wants to save some of those images, the glasses can store them for future retrieval.
The glasses will be available to medical professionals early next year. But for those who want something even more high-tech than these glasses, there are also robotic devices that stick needles into veins. The SAGIV system, developed by staff and students from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, uses infrared light and electrical sensors to find the veins and pop in a needle quickly and as painlessly as possible. The unit is a handheld semiautomatic device — maybe they ought to come up with better descriptors, lest anyone think they’re talking about a gun — and represents the increasing trend of medical practitioners using robotic devices to enhance their technique and deliver better results to patients.
Between the Eyes-On Glasses and the Eye-Phone, medical technology is developing the ability to turn a doctor into Superman. Let’s just hope there’s no super-villain out there developing the equivalent of medical kryptonite!
