A Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered Nerve Stimulation Device Shows Promise for Taming Tourette's Tics
Inspired by research into wearable TENS devices, DeepFriedPancake's Kevin sets about building his own Tourette's tic "firewall."
Mononymous maker and student Kevin, of the YouTube channel DeepFriedPancake, has put a Raspberry Pi Pico W to work as a nerve stimulation device — with a view to hopefully reducing the tics caused by Tourette's syndrome.
"I have Tourette's syndrome, which basically means that my brain leacks excessive signals causing me to do involuntary actions called 'tics,'" Kevin explains. "These include spilling out noises, offensive sentences, gestures, swinging my arms or cracking my joints. Before I do an action, there is a premonition urge similar to a sneeze or an itch; one of the inner parts of my brain floods the motion control center, going 'you have to do this action,' and if I try to ignore the urge it would just occupy my thoughts until I execute that action."
Inspired by a paper published by researchers at the University of Nottingham last year, a preprint of which is available on medRxiv under open-access terms, Kevin decided to adopt a technological salve for the problem: a median nerve stimulation system, which injected rhythmic 10-12Hz pulses into the subject's nervous system — resulting, the team found, in a measurable reduction in tics among the trial group.
Kevin's attempt to replicate the team's results centers around a Raspberry Pi Pico W development board and its RP2040 microcontroller, which serves as the heart of the homebrew transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) system. A 9V battery is boosted to 40V through a step-up converter, then fed into a half-bridge driver that in turn delivers the voltage to the user through electrode pad positioned along the median nerve. Everything is controlled via a smartphone over Bluetooth.
"This is by no means a rigorous or formal medical experiment," Kevin admits, "it is more qualitative and subjective based on my feelings. [But] you can see a sort of significant reduction in the amount of tic instances [with the device]. In terms of subjective feeling, I also feel quite differently when I'm applying the pulse — I feel more at-ease and worry less about having the urge to tic, though this could also be a placebo effect."
The project is documented in full in the video embedded above and on Kevin's YouTube channel, DeepFriedPancake.