Posted 24 March, 2019
A friend told me about a recent medical study at MIT where lab mice (genetically engineered to form amyloid plaques in their brains to emulate a syndrome commonly associated with Alzheimer’s) were subjected a 40Hz strobe light several hours per day. After repeated exposures, the mice showed significantly reduced plaque density in their brains, leading the researchers to speculate that ‘light strobe therapy’ might be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s in humans.
The friend’s spouse has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so naturally he was keen to try this with his spouse, and asked me if I knew anything about strobe lights and strobe timing, etc. I told him I could probably come up with something fairly quickly, and so I started a project to design and fabricate a light strobe therapy box.
The project involves a 3D printed housing and 9V battery clip, along with a white LED and a Sparkfun Pro Micro 5V/16MHz microcontroller, as shown in the following schematic.
Strobe Therapy schematic
I had a reflector hanging around from another project, so I used it just as much for the aesthetics as for functionality, and I designed and printed up a 2-part cylindrical housing. I also downloaded and printed a 9V battery clip to hold the battery, as shown in the following photos
Finished Strobe Therapy Unit
Internal parts arrangement
Closeup showing Sparkfun Pro Micro microcontroller
The program to generate the 40Hz strobe pulses is simplicity itself. I used the Arduino ‘elapsedMillis’ library for more accurate frequency tuning, but ‘delay()’ would probably be close enough as well.
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/* Name: StrobeTherapy.ino Created: 3/21/2019 6:51:45 PM Author: FRANKWIN10\Frank */ #include <elapsedMillis.h> const int LED_PIN = 2; const float BLINK_DELAY_MSEC = 25; elapsedMillis sinceLastBlink; //strobe frequency delay void setup() { Serial.begin(115200); pinMode(LED_PIN, OUTPUT); } void loop() { if (sinceLastBlink >= BLINK_DELAY_MSEC) { sinceLastBlink -= BLINK_DELAY_MSEC; digitalWrite(LED_PIN, HIGH); delay(BLINK_DELAY_MSEC/2); //LED ON time (msec) digitalWrite(LED_PIN, LOW); } } |
I’m not sure if this will do any good, but I was happy to help someone whose loved one is suffering from this cruel disease.
Frank