Show HN: Alzheimer's Buddy: Use Flashing Light and Sound at 40Hz

96 points

2 years ago

I recently learned about some fascinating research done at MIT for potentially treating Alzheimer’s using light and sound stimulation at 40 hertz. Nothing has been proven yet, but it seemed compelling to me, especially given the safety and simplicity of the treatment (i.e., no drugs, no electrodes, just looking at light and hearing sounds).

I wanted to try it myself, but was surprised how hard it was to find something free and easy to use to generate such pulses. Which is odd because I remember some freeware DOS program I tried back in the 90s which did all this kind of stuff (anyone know what I’m talking about? Google fails me…).

So anyway, I made this tool in a couple hours and put it up as a public service so that older people can try this treatment now without waiting years for FDA trials to finish and without getting a diagnosis and expensive piece of medical equipment. The code is available here:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/anti_alzheimers_flasher

As an aside, I first tried making this in Rust, but gave up after finding it incredibly annoying to deal with the wgpu library with its ever changing and breaking API. This was a surprise because I generally find working in Rust to be quite pleasant.

In contrast, doing it in JS was a total breeze, and I was impressed how well canvas and webaudio works nowadays. It also makes it easy to add documentation right there on the page, to distribute it, and to get it working on mobile phones automatically. Web development is pretty awesome!

The best part is that, because I made it as a single html file on GitHub, I was able to deploy it without even setting up Nginx on a machine somewhere— I just used Cloudflare Pages and the whole thing took a couple minutes (getting the domain from Cloudflare made things even easier since they automatically handled everything with the certificate).

I realize that there are limitations in using a computer screen for precise flashing given hardware refresh rates. I’d certainly welcome any PRs if people have ideas about how to improve it or make it more efficient without breaking it on mobile. I tried to do the flashing in a way that can be easily hardware accelerated in modern browsers. The hardest part was getting rid of the disconcerting popping artifacts when starting and stopping the low frequency audio, but I resolved it by ramping up and down the volume beforehand.

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