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A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

blog.benjamin-cabe.com

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Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#31

Post by ssewell »

bb123 wrote: post #6

Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were behind it.

I, for one, am one of those people. However, after watching a few minutes of the linked video, I'm convinced (and pleasantly surprised) that Caleb has firm grasp on his design, and honestly sounds like he was the driving force behind his own particular implementation.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#32

Post by kartben_ »

ssewell wrote: post #31
bb123 wrote: post #6

Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were behind it.

I, for one, am one of those people. However, after watching a few minutes of the linked video, I'm convinced (and pleasantly surprised) that Caleb has firm grasp on his design, and honestly sounds like he was the driving force behind his own particular implementation.

This. Thanks for taking the time to watch the video to form your own opinion!

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#33

Post by hwillis »

amelius wrote: post #25

The main invention is in the electronic nose. The kid just did the plumbing of connecting it to some ML library. Of course, the electronic nose itself is a work of plumbing too, where some existing gas sensors are put on a pcb. In short, nothing seems really new here, but the application is interesting. I guess it's always interesting when people start looking for correlations in data and get some positive results, s…

The sensor (the four gas sensors on the board) was created by a third person.

The artificial nose is the TinyML model which trains on the sensor data (CO, NO2, ethanol, VOCs) to detect arbitrary scents by their signatures in those four categories.

The fungal pneumonia detector wires up a whole API with azure etc. and trains the model specifically to recognize pneumonia, based on an actual science experiment which grew and measured the fungus in artificial lungs.

As far as I'm concerned, both Caleb and Benjamin had brilliant ideas, executed them fantastically, and created something that may be truly useful. A $40 sensor that can detect disease just by breathing on it is more of a tangible contribution to humanity than many software engineers make in their life and almost certainly more than 99% of us did before the age of 14.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#34

Post by kartben_ »

amelius wrote: post #25

The main invention is in the electronic nose. The kid just did the plumbing of connecting it to some ML library. Of course, the electronic nose itself is a work of plumbing too, where some existing gas sensors are put on a pcb. In short, nothing seems really new here, but the application is interesting. I guess it's always interesting when people start looking for correlations in data and get some positive results, s…

With this reasoning, aren't most things a work of plumbing, and nothing ever really new? And isn't it how innovation happens, at the end of the day?

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#35

Post by ajsnigrutin »

bb123 wrote: post #6

Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were behind it.

> turns out to be bogus

Sometimes very bogus, even totally fake

example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc ('free energy' device, "invented" by a kid, debunked by electroboom)

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#36

Post by NavinF »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.

> why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router

I’m with her on this one. Not announcing the outage before it happens is kinda disrespectful.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#37

Post by hwillis »

bb123 wrote: post #6

Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were behind it.

If you watch the video it's very apparent that the kid deeply knows how everything works. If he did not make this entire (very impressive) project himself, he certainly could have. He understands how chemicals interact with the various gas sensors (used limonene, pine and seed oils as test substances), how the model works, how to grow fungus in a sterile environment to get training data, how to get an API together to service the device...

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#38

Post by orf »

csdvrx wrote: post #27
cinntaile wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does when the title says "13yo kid builds e-nose". It's not about privilege, it's about being honest. Maybe the title is honest and the kid is just very bright, that's cool too!

Yet most people seem to be jumping to the conclusion, making assumptions, and letting their views taint their judgment, without even knowing all the facts (see a comment below asking if the parents were already working in the field)

You wrote a 300 word response full of jumped-to conclusions, assumptions etc to someone just asking what his parents did.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#39

Post by martneumann »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.

"Daaad, are you complaining about me on the Internet again?!" ;)

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#40

Post by mschuster91 »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.

> and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.

Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4) or warn your users before doing maintenance.

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