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

alzheimersbuddy.com

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

#32

Cool concept and project. I don't know if browsers are capable of doing the flash reliably. I tried it out (non-epileptic and curious), and you can see that it's not a reliable 40Hz flash on either Chrome or Firefox. I haven't looked to see what technique you are using for the timing, but there's quite a bit of jitter. EDIT: it's using requestAnimationFrame. Rather than using that, have you tried using CSS keyframes?…

Whether it's RAF or CSS, this would only reliably work on a 120hz display (or anything else higher than 80hz and divisible by 40.)

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

#34
The code effectively flashes the monitor at 30 Hz on any 60 Hz monitor (the time delta will always be 16.66 ms or more). I have tried this before and noticed a lasting effect on the monitor that was visible after stopping the flashing. Just a warning. I thought I had damaged the screen.

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

#37

I'm not sure what just happened but this webpage literally damaged my monitor. There is now some flickering over the whole screen (it's not my mind, I filmed and checked my mind with another screen)

See this slow mo video taken with my phone: https://anonymfile.com/n7yX/vid-20240126151605.mp4

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

#40
First: in mice, raised on a doxycycline-containing diet.

Second: if I've understood correctly, there's no idea about what causes Alzheimer, which would reduce the significance of finding reduced levels of tau.

Third: there was physical vibration at 40Hz. This cannot be reproduced with headphones or earplugs, let alone a computer speaker. The experiment used a 12 inch sub-woofer (at undocumented levels, but I assume that the levels for humans must exceed those for mice). 40Hz might not even be suitable for humans if the effect stems from oscillations in the physical brain matter rather than electrical.

Four: the number of subjects per condition is very low, and the variance is high. The individual data points can be seen on the graphs, and don't give me much confidence. E.g., 2 mice in the grid hang condition failed immediately, but the other 2 performed in the lower range of the other group. Don't get your hopes up.

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