Wired.com – Breakthrough Medical Gadgets: The Future of Healthcare Hardware

Jabbing a needle into someone’s vein isn’t as easy as it looks. Even experienced nurses run into trouble once in a while. So, to solve this problem, the AccuVein wand scans for thick blood vessels and then projects a picture of them onto the patient’s skin. It shows you exactly where to stick the needle (disclaimer: our photo doesn’t do the true effect justice), but doesn’t work that well on hairy arms.

Push a single button and it shines a beam of infrared light onto the patient. Hemoglobin in his or her veins absorbs the light and shows the wand where the veins are. The projector lights up all of the areas where you shouldn’t stick a needle, leaving blank areas above all of the largest veins. AccuVein is already available in more than a thousand hospitals.