I came across a really interesting app that was recently released in the medical section of the Apple App Store — VeinSeek. VeinSeek uses live video processing to “find your veins”. You can obviously infer how this would be helpful in the healthcare setting.
Devices that help find veins have been used for some time. Many of them use infrared light to show veins:
The VeinSeek app is interesting in that it doesn’t need any attachments or special camera. It takes images from your iPhone camera’s red and green channels, converts them to black and white, and then removes brightness values of the green image from the brightness values of the red image.
The developers make it clear the app is not intended for use in the medical setting even though it’s in the medical section of the app store.
I used the app on myself and with a few physician partners and we were surprised by how well it worked. The screenshots shown in the iTunes description don’t do it justice. Obviously, at this stage VeinSeek is just a novelty and couldn’t be used on patients.
Either way, I find the concept VeinSeek uses really fascinating and it would be interesting to see if these developers or others could tweak the algorithms to make this functionality medical grade. Currently VeinSeek is free to download
iPhone Link
Android: Not available
