DEV Community: David Bosah

The Science of Deleting Trauma

David Bosah — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:15:22 +0000

What If You Could Delete the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to You?
Not forget it the way time blurs things. Not manage it with therapy and medication and breathing exercises for the rest of your life. Actually delete it, at the molecular level, the way you would delete a file.
That question stopped being entirely hypothetical some time ago.
Sarah was 29 when she was in a car accident that killed her younger brother. She walked away physically. She did not walk away in any other sense. For the next four years she could not sit in a moving vehicle without her heart rate climbing into territory that felt like dying. She tried therapy, tried medication, tried everything her doctors offered, and made progress the way people describe making progress when they mean they are slightly better at surviving something rather than actually free from it.
She is not unusual. Around 70% of people globally will experience a potentially traumatic event during their lifetime, and an estimated 3.9% of the world's population has experienced PTSD at some point in their lives. (PubMed Central) That translates to hundreds of millions of people carrying memories that their own minds have weaponised against them, memories that don't stay in the past, that intrude into the present without warning, that make ordinary situations feel like the original threat is happening all over again.
Current treatments for PTSD are genuinely helpful and I want to be honest about that. Cognitive behavioural therapy works for many people. EMDR — eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing — has strong evidence behind it. Certain medications reduce the intensity of symptoms. These are real tools that change real lives. But they all share the same fundamental approach, teaching the brain to manage and suppress a traumatic memory rather than addressing the memory itself at its biological root.
The question nobody has fully answered yet is whether that root can be targeted directly.
Here's what the science tells us about how traumatic memories actually form.
When something traumatic happens the brain doesn't just record it the way a camera records footage. It encodes it, through a biological process involving protein synthesis in the hippocampus, the brain region most responsible for memory consolidation. Specific proteins, particularly those involved in long term potentiation, literally restructure the connections between neurons to make the memory stick. The more emotionally intense the event, the more the amygdala amplifies this process, which is why traumatic memories can feel more vivid and more immediately present than ordinary ones even decades later.
This is where it gets interesting.
Researchers have already demonstrated in animal studies that blocking these protein synthesis mechanisms after a traumatic event can prevent the memory from consolidating permanently. Protein synthesis inhibitors like anisomycin have been shown to disrupt memory reconsolidation in rodents. Propranolol, a beta blocker already used clinically, has been administered to trauma patients within hours of an event and shown to blunt the emotional intensity of the memory during its consolidation window. The biology of memory is not fixed. It is a process, and like any biological process it can be interrupted.
What I'm proposing takes this a step further.
A targeted hippocampal protein injection, administered either prophylactically in the immediate aftermath of a known traumatic event, or therapeutically during a reconsolidation window when the memory has been deliberately reactivated, that specifically disrupts the molecular mechanisms responsible for encoding the traumatic memory's pathological intensity without erasing the factual content of what happened.
The distinction matters enormously. The goal is not to make someone forget they were in an accident or that something terrible happened to them. It is to remove the pathological encoding, the part that makes the memory a weapon the brain turns on its own owner, while leaving the episodic record intact. Not deletion. Defanging.
The reconsolidation window is the key mechanism here. Every time a memory is recalled it briefly becomes unstable, re-entering a plastic state where it can be modified before it reconsolidates. Researchers have already used this window therapeutically, pairing memory reactivation with pharmacological intervention to update the emotional content of traumatic memories. The injection concept builds on this foundation, targeting hippocampal protein synthesis during that window with precision that existing pharmacological approaches don't yet achieve.
The closest existing research involves HDAC inhibitors being used during reconsolidation to attenuate remote traumatic memories in mice, including memories months old that had previously been resistant to standard extinction approaches. The molecular machinery is there. The therapeutic target is understood. The gap is specificity and deliverability in humans.
The questions this raises are the ones medicine hasn't answered yet.
Who decides what memories qualify as traumatic enough to warrant intervention? A soldier returning from combat and a child who witnessed domestic violence are easy cases. But what about the person whose trauma is real to them but invisible to others, the chronic low grade experiences that accumulate over years?
What happens to accountability when the memory is altered? If someone witnessed a crime and then had a hippocampal intervention, what does that mean for their testimony? For the prosecution of the person who harmed them?
Are we still the same person without our difficult memories? Some philosophers and psychologists would argue that our identity is inseparable from the full arc of our experience, including the painful parts, that removing traumatic encoding doesn't just treat a condition but alters who someone is in ways they cannot fully consent to before the fact.
Who has access to this? A technology like this, if it works, would be extraordinarily valuable. The history of medicine suggests that extraordinarily valuable treatments reach wealthy populations first and everyone else much later or never. A soldier in a well funded military gets the injection. A child in a conflict zone in sub-Saharan Africa does not.
And perhaps the most unsettling question of all — if this technology exists, who else uses it? Not just clinicians treating willing patients, but systems with access and incentive to alter what people remember about what was done to them.
These are not reasons to stop the science. They are reasons to make sure the ethics move at the same speed as the biology.
Sarah deserves to sit in a car without feeling like she is dying. So do the hundreds of millions of people carrying memories that medicine currently has no complete answer for.
The molecular machinery to help them is closer than most people realise.
The conversation about whether and how to use it needs to start now, before the technology arrives and forces the conversation on its own terms.

The Capsule That Could End Colon Cancer

David Bosah — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:08:40 +0000

The Pill That Reads Your Gut
James was 38 when his doctor first suggested a colonoscopy.
Not because he had symptoms, not because something felt wrong, but because his father had died of colorectal cancer at 61 and his older brother had polyps removed two years earlier, and those two facts together meant James was no longer in the average risk category. He was in the category where you don't wait until 45. You start now.
James nodded, said he'd schedule it, and then spent the next four years not scheduling it.
It wasn't fear exactly, or not only fear. It was the whole package, the bowel prep the night before that clears you out completely and leaves you exhausted before the procedure even begins, the sedation, the day off work, the someone to drive you home, the camera going where cameras have no business going, the recovery, the awkwardness of the whole thing. He knew it was important. He just kept finding reasons to put it off.
He's not unusual. An estimated one in three adults in the US are not being screened for colorectal cancer as recommended. (IntuitionLabs) And that gap between knowing you should do something and actually doing it is costing an enormous number of lives, because when colorectal cancer is caught at a localised stage the five year survival rate is 91%, but if it isn't detected until late stage that number drops to 14%. (MDPI) Only one in three cases are diagnosed at that early localised stage. (MDPI)
The disease is beatable. The screening is the problem.
Here's what I keep thinking about though. Colonoscopy is a genuinely remarkable procedure and I don't want to dismiss what it's made possible. It can find a polyp, remove it in the same session, and prevent a cancer that would have formed ten years later from ever forming at all. That's not nothing, that's actually extraordinary. But it's also invasive, uncomfortable, time consuming, requires sedation, carries real if small risks of perforation and bleeding, and demands a level of commitment from the patient that a significant portion of people simply won't give. Colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death in men under 50 and the second leading cause in women of the same age group, with young people often diagnosed with more advanced cancers specifically because of delays in detection. (MDPI)
We have a tool that works and people aren't using it. That's a systems problem, not a medical one.
So what if the screening didn't ask that much of you.
What if it asked almost nothing at all.
Here's what I'm proposing. A swallowable capsule, about the size of a standard vitamin tablet, that you take in the morning with a glass of water and then go about your entire day normally. No bowel prep. No sedation. No hospital admission. No recovery time. No one to drive you home. Just a pill, swallowed, that travels your entire gastrointestinal tract over the next 24 to 48 hours carried naturally by the same muscular contractions that move food through your system every day.
But this capsule isn't a camera.
That's the important distinction. Capsule endoscopy already exists and already does something impressive, a tiny camera swallowed as a pill, travelling the GI tract, taking thousands of images, transmitting them wirelessly to a receiver worn on a belt. It's already FDA approved and already used clinically. But it has the same fundamental limitation as colonoscopy — it sees what's visually there. A lesion that's already formed. A polyp that's already growing. Something that has already gone wrong and is now big enough to photograph.
What I'm describing reads what's there before anything is visible. Before any lesion. Before any polyp. At the stage where cells are just beginning to show the biochemical and bioelectrical signatures of metaplastic tendency — the earliest possible whisper of change, detectable in the tissue's molecular behaviour long before it becomes detectable by any camera or any eye.
The capsule does this by emitting signals outward in 360 degrees as it travels, continuously, the entire length of its journey from oesophagus to rectum. Bioelectrical impedance signals that read the electrical resistance of the mucosal cells surrounding it, because healthy cells and cells under metaplastic stress have measurably different electrical properties. Near infrared spectroscopy that reads how the tissue absorbs and reflects light, because different tissue states have different spectroscopic signatures. pH sensing that detects micro disruptions in the gut's normal chemical gradient, because abnormal mucosal areas disturb that gradient locally in ways that are detectable before they're visible.
Every reading the capsule takes is tagged to a precise location using internal tracking technology, building a complete integrity map of the entire mucosal surface as it travels. By the time the capsule completes its journey the map is done, a full picture of every section of your GI tract showing which areas are healthy, which are stressed, and which are showing the earliest possible cellular signals of concern.
That data transmits wirelessly in real time to a receiver the patient wears like a small patch. By the time you've gone to work, had lunch, picked up the kids, and gone to bed, your doctor has a complete mucosal integrity report of your entire gastrointestinal tract waiting in their inbox.
Something close to this is already being explored. Researchers have developed a swallowable capsule that probes tissue mechanics using vibration and accelerometer technology, detecting structural differences between normal tissue and lesions. That's remarkable work and it points in exactly the right direction. But it's still detecting structural changes, things that have already shifted mechanically. The concept I'm describing goes one level deeper, reading the biochemical and bioelectrical signatures of cells that haven't structurally changed yet but are beginning to show the molecular behaviour that precedes change.
The difference matters enormously in clinical terms. Benign polyps typically take approximately 10 to 15 years to develop into cancer. (ScienceDirect) If you can detect metaplastic tendency at its earliest stage you're potentially intervening a decade or more before a cancer would form. You're not treating cancer. You're preventing it from ever becoming cancer.
And the implications for who gets screened change completely.
Right now colonoscopy is recommended starting at 45 for average risk adults. The procedure's demands mean most people treat it as something to do when they have to, not something they do routinely every few years the way they get a blood pressure check or a blood test. But a swallowable capsule with no prep, no sedation, no recovery, and no disruption to your day is something you could do every year from your thirties. From your twenties if there's family history. The barrier to compliance drops so dramatically that screening stops being the thing people avoid and starts being the thing people actually do.
It's estimated that up to 60% of all colon cancer related deaths could be prevented if everyone followed appropriate screening recommendations. (ScienceDirect) The screening recommendations aren't the problem. The screening experience is the problem.
James eventually had his colonoscopy. Four years late. Everything was fine, two small polyps, both removed, follow up in three years. He told me afterwards that it wasn't as bad as he'd built it up to be in his head, that he'd do it again, that he wished he hadn't waited so long.
He was lucky that waiting four years didn't cost him anything.
Not everyone who waits is that lucky.
The technology to build this capsule isn't assembled yet but the components exist across materials science, bioelectrical sensing, spectroscopy, and wireless transmission. The engineering challenge is real and significant. The miniaturisation required is at the frontier of what's currently possible.
But the need is too large and the gap too consequential for this to remain just a concept.
James shouldn't need courage to get screened. Nobody should.
Swallow the pill. Go to work. Let the data do the rest.

The Glasses That Turn an Audience Into Shadows

David Bosah — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:00:33 +0000

What If You Just Couldn't See Their Faces?
Marcus had rehearsed the speech 47 times, in his hotel room the night before, in the shower that morning, in the car on the way to the venue, and in the green room while his team adjusted the lighting on stage. He knew every word, every pause, every transition, every moment where he was supposed to smile and every moment where he was supposed to let the silence do the work. He had built this company from two people in a Lagos apartment to 340 employees across four countries, and this product launch was the moment that was supposed to prove all of it was worth something.
He walked out onto the stage and looked up.
And that was it. The faces got him. Hundreds of them, journalists, investors, partners, competitors, all of them staring directly at him with expressions he couldn't read, waiting for him to say something brilliant, and his brain, the same brain that had navigated board meetings and funding rounds and a global pandemic, went completely blank.
His heart was doing something alarming, his mouth had turned into something resembling dry cement, and the first sentence he'd rehearsed 47 times was just gone, like someone had walked into his head and switched off the lights.

He stood there for what felt like eleven years but was probably four seconds, and somehow got through it. But he told me afterwards that he'd have given anything in that moment to just not see their faces.
Here's something worth sitting with for a second. Public speaking is the most common human phobia, more common than the fear of death, more common than spiders or heights or enclosed spaces. About 75% of people experience it to some degree, and for a significant portion of those people it isn't just nerves, it's a genuine anxiety response that can derail careers, stall ambitions, and make talented people invisible in rooms where they deserve to be seen. And the reason is genuinely strange when you think about it.

Your brain cannot tell the difference between standing in front of an audience and being chased by something that wants to eat you. I'm not being dramatic, that's literally what's happening. The amygdala, the ancient alarm system buried deep in your brain, looks at a room full of staring human faces and files it under threat. It doesn't matter that you're wearing an expensive suit and holding a clicker, your limbic system thinks you're about to be attacked, so it does what it was designed to do, floods your body with adrenaline, tightens your muscles, dries your mouth, speeds up your heart, and prepares you to fight or run.
Neither of which is particularly useful when you're trying to launch a product to an international press room.

The solutions we've come up with over the centuries are honestly underwhelming given the scale of the problem. Practice more, breathe deeply, imagine the audience in their underwear, take beta blockers if you're really desperate. These aren't terrible suggestions exactly, but they're all asking the same thing, override your biology through willpower and preparation. And for a lot of people that works well enough, but for Marcus standing on that stage with his mind wiped clean, it wasn't enough, and it's never enough for the people who need it most.
So I've been thinking about a completely different approach.
What if you didn't have to override your biology at all, what if you just removed the trigger.
The trigger isn't public speaking, the trigger is faces. Specifically the experience of looking out at a crowd and seeing hundreds of pairs of human eyes staring back at you, unblinking, waiting, judging. That specific visual input is what tells your amygdala something is wrong, and if you take away that input, the alarm never goes off.
Here's what I'm proposing. A pair of AR glasses, augmented reality lenses that look and feel like regular eyewear, that does one specific thing when you put them on before stepping on stage. It converts every human face in your field of vision into a simple black silhouette, no eyes, no expressions, no judgment you can read or misread, just shapes, the same shapes you see in your peripheral vision when you're alone, familiar, non-threatening, safe.

The audience is still there, every single one of them, you're not speaking into an empty room, you can see their body language, their movement, whether they're engaged or quietly checking their phones. But the part of the visual information that your amygdala uses to trigger the threat response, the direct eye contact, the readable expressions, the sea of watching faces, that part is filtered out in real time by the lens.
Your rational brain stays in charge, the amygdala never gets the signal to panic, and Marcus gets to deliver the speech he spent 47 sessions rehearsing without his own biology sabotaging him at the worst possible moment.
The technology to build this isn't speculative. AR glasses already overlay digital information onto real world environments in real time, face detection and real time image processing already exist in consumer devices, and the silhouette conversion is essentially a computer vision filter applied through the lens as you see the world. The hardware exists, the software concept exists, what doesn't exist yet is someone combining them specifically for this purpose.
And the need is genuinely massive. About 20% of people quietly avoid career paths specifically because those paths require public speaking, that's one in five talented people editing their own ambitions because standing in front of a crowd feels like standing in front of something that wants to kill them.
Marcus eventually got through that launch, the product did well, but he told me he spent the next six months dreading the follow up presentation, and that dread cost him more energy than all 47 rehearsals combined.
He shouldn't have to choose between his fear and his ambition.
Neither should the other three billion people who feel exactly what he felt on that stage.
The faces are the problem, and we already have the technology to change what the faces look like.
We just haven't built it yet.

ARTERIOTHREAD: A Device Thinner Than Paper That Could End Heart Disease as We Know It

David Bosah — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:55:31 +0000

Linda was 54 when she walked into the cardiology clinic for what she thought was a routine checkup.
She wasn't clutching her chest. She wasn't gasping. She felt fine, mostly. A little tired lately but nothing she couldn't blame on work and two teenage kids and not enough sleep. The kind of tired you wave away.
The doctor didn't wave it away. He ordered some blood tests and investigations.

He pulled up her angiogram on the screen and went quiet for a moment — the kind of quiet that makes your stomach drop. Her arteries were a mess. Years of accumulated cholesterol and fatty plaque coating the walls of her vessels like rust inside old pipes. Not just one artery, widespread. The kind of buildup that doesn't announce itself until it kills you.
He turned to face her.
"Linda," he said. "We need to talk about your options."

Every 33 seconds, somewhere in the world, someone dies from cardiovascular disease. In 2021 alone, cardiovascular disease claimed 20.5 million lives — roughly one third of every death on the planet that year. (Wiley Online Library) And sitting at the centre of most of those deaths is the same quiet villain, Cholesterol plaque. Arteries slowly strangled over decades while the person living inside that body has absolutely no idea.
The frustrating part isn't that we don't understand it. We do, in fact we've understood it for over a century. The frustrating part is that our solutions haven't fundamentally changed in a very long time.
Linda's doctor laid them out for her the way cardiologists have been laying them out for decades. Statins to slow the buildup. Diet and lifestyle changes. Maybe a stent to prop open the worst blockages. Maybe bypass surgery if things got bad enough — chest cracked open, veins harvested from her leg, a procedure that even when it goes perfectly still takes months to recover from.
Manage it, Live around it, Hope for the best.
She left the clinic that day with a prescription and a referral and the particular kind of dread that comes from being told your body has been working against you for years without your knowledge.

Here's what I keep thinking about though.
Medicine has come an enormous distance. Statins arrived in the 1980s and genuinely transformed cardiovascular care. Interventional cardiology gave us stents and balloon angioplasty—a minimally invasive procedure that uses a tiny, inflatable balloon on a catheter to open narrowed or blocked arteries.
But here's the honest truth. Every single one of those solutions is either managing the problem or patching specific spots. Nobody has figured out how to systematically clear a human body's entire arterial network of the cholesterol and plaque that has been accumulating for decades.

Not yet.

So I've been thinking about what that would actually look like. And I want to propose something.

Call it the ArterioThread.

Picture an open ended cylindrical elastic membrane. Thinner than a sheet of paper. Both ends open like a sleeve with nothing blocking either side. It sounds simple and that's exactly the point — the elegance of this device is in what that simple structure can do inside a human body.
It enters through a single access point, compressed inside a delivery catheter small enough to be inserted at the wrist or the groin the same way cardiologists access arteries every day. The operator is watching a live angiogram the entire time — a real time X-ray of the vascular system displayed on a screen beside the patient. Full visibility. Full control. They can see exactly where the device is and what the walls around it look like at every moment.
Once inside the vessel it opens.

The ArterioThread expands outward from its compressed state and presses itself flat against the entire inner circumference of the artery wall. Not travelling down the centre like a wire. Not targeting one blocked spot. Lining the wall completely — the way a thin elastic sleeve hugs whatever surface it's stretched around — making full simultaneous contact with every part of the artery it's inside.
Blood keeps flowing normally through the open centre. The device doesn't block anything. It just lines.
And that lining is where everything happens.
The outer surface of the membrane is engineered to bond with cholesterol deposits and fatty plaque on contact. The plaque attaches to the membrane the way dust clings to a damp cloth pressed firmly against a surface. No scraping or aggressive mechanical force. No vibration breaking off dangerous chunks that could travel downstream and trigger a clot or a stroke. Just clean controlled adhesion across the entire surface simultaneously.

As the ArterioThread travels deeper — from the aorta into smaller and smaller branches, the coronary arteries feeding the heart, the carotid arteries feeding the brain, the renal arteries feeding the kidneys, eventually down into vessels so narrow a red blood cell can barely squeeze through — the elastic cylinder compresses automatically to match whatever diameter it finds. It never forces rather it fits and everywhere it fits it lines, contacts, and collects.
When the angiogram confirms clean walls the operator withdraws the device slowly back through the same access point. The membrane folds inward on itself as it retracts, sealing everything it collected inside. Out of the body completely. Taking decades of accumulated plaque with it.
The incision closes. The patient recovers.
And for the first time the arterial walls that spent years quietly accumulating that damage are clean.

And for the first time in the history of cardiovascular medicine, every artery in that body is clean.

The closest things that exist today give you a sense of why this matters and why it's hard. Intravascular lithotripsy uses sound waves to crack hardened calcified plaque at specific blocked spots. Researchers at Drexel University are developing micro-swimmers delivered by catheter with tiny mechanical drills to clear blockages. Nanoparticles from Michigan State and SAHMRI in Australia are being designed to seek out plaque in artery walls and break it down from the inside. All of it is impressive. All of it targeted at specific locations.
None of it goes everywhere.
The gap is systemic coverage. The ability to treat not just the artery that already looks dangerous on a scan but every artery — including the ones that haven't caused a problem yet but will. That's where a device like this changes everything. Not reactive medicine, but preventive and comprehensive. The difference between fixing the pipe that's already burst and inspecting every pipe in the building before any of them do.
Linda is a fictional patient but her situation is completely real.
Right now there are hundreds of millions of people walking around with exactly her arterial profile — plaque quietly accumulating, symptoms absent, the first sign of a problem often being the last. High LDL cholesterol alone was responsible for over 70 million years of healthy life lost globally in 2023. (ScienceDirect)

The technology to address this systematically doesn't exist yet. The materials science, the miniaturisation, the real time imaging guidance, the mechanical engineering of something elastic enough to navigate the full diameter range of the human vascular system — all of it presents genuine unsolved challenges.
But none of it is impossible. And the pieces are closer than most people realise.
Somewhere between the nanoparticles being tested in pig arteries in Adelaide and the micro-swimmers being designed in Philadelphia and the live angiographic guidance already used in catheter labs every day around the world — the components of this idea already exist in fragments.
They just haven't been assembled into one thing yet.
Linda deserves better than managing a problem that could be solved. So do the 20 million people a year who don't get the chance to walk out of a cardiology clinic with a prescription and a referral and a fighting chance.
The pipes can be cleaned. We just need to build the right tool.

Who Taught the Robot to Cut?

David Bosah — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:05:43 +0000

Okay so I need you to actually sit with this one for a second.
A robot performed surgery. Alone. Nobody controlling it, nobody guiding it, nobody at a console. Just a machine, a patient, and an algorithm making every single decision in real time.
I'm a final year medical student. I've watched surgeries. I've seen how much concentration, intuition, and honestly just raw experience goes into what happens in that theatre. So when I tell you this stopped me cold, I mean it.
Let me back up though.
Surgery has always been about the human hand. Not just the technical skill, but the judgment behind it. Reading a surgical field isn't something you can explain easily, experienced surgeons will tell you it's almost instinctive after a while. You see something that doesn't look right and you adjust before you can even articulate why.
For all that brilliance though, surgeons are still human. They fatigue. They have bad days. And in huge parts of the world, especially across Africa and Southeast Asia, there just aren't enough of them. Patients wait. Conditions worsen. Some don't make it.
Robotic surgery was the first serious attempt to address part of that problem. Most people have heard of the da Vinci system at this point. Surgeon sits at a console, their movements get translated into precise robotic action inside the patient's body. Smaller incisions, quicker recovery, fewer complications. Genuinely transformative when it arrived.
But the surgeon was still there running everything. The robot did what it was told, nothing more.
Then Johns Hopkins did something that I think is genuinely one of the most significant moments in surgical history and it barely made mainstream news.
In 2022 their team built STAR, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, and it performed soft tissue surgery on a pig without any human guidance whatsoever. Then in July 2025 they published results on their next system and this is the part that got me. It watched video recordings of expert surgeons performing gallbladder removals. Studied them. Learned from them. Then performed the same procedure independently on human like surgical models, 17 steps, eight separate times, with 100% accuracy.
When tissue got obscured it adapted. When its starting position changed it adjusted. It didn't hesitate.
Now here's something that gets lost whenever this story gets covered.
People focus on the robotic arm. That's not really the story. The story is about what the robot can see. These systems use AI powered imaging that reads the surgical field in real time, processing information continuously and informing every movement as the procedure unfolds. The robot isn't executing a fixed plan. It's responding to what's in front of it as things change.
But here's what I keep thinking about.
The Johns Hopkins system learned from videos. That's remarkable, genuinely. But videos show you what surgery generally looks like, not what this specific patient looks like on this specific day. Every human body is different. Positions shift. Anatomy varies in ways that even experienced surgeons find surprising sometimes.
So what if the robot was also receiving live radiographic imaging throughout the entire procedure? Real time AI processed X-rays, fluoroscopy, intraoperative CT, feeding the system continuously so it knows exactly where it is inside that specific body at every single moment. Not working from memory of what a gallbladder removal usually looks like. Actually seeing your gallbladder, your blood vessels, your specific anatomy, live, and making decisions based on that.
That's the version of autonomous surgery that I think makes the leap from impressive to genuinely reliable. Because the gap between a learned procedure and a live human body is exactly where things go wrong. Live imaging closes that gap.
And that's also where my brain starts asking the uncomfortable questions.
Because when something goes wrong, and I say when not if because no system is perfect, who is responsible? The engineer who wrote the algorithm? The hospital that approved its deployment? The company that manufactured it? The surgeon who was technically present but whose hands never touched anything?
We don't have a clean answer to that right now. Medical liability law was built on the assumption that a human being is always the final decision maker in that room. That assumption is being quietly dismantled and I'm not sure enough people in medicine are paying attention to it yet.
There's also something else worth saying. These systems learn from data. The quality and diversity of that data determines how well the robot performs across different patients, different body types, different anatomical variations. If the training data is narrow the robot's judgment will be narrow too. That's not a hypothetical, it's a pattern we've already seen play out in medical AI.
None of this means the technology isn't worth pursuing. The idea that a system like this, especially one enhanced with live radiographic guidance, could one day operate in a rural clinic in Northern Nigeria or a field hospital in a conflict zone, performing procedures that currently require specialists nobody there has access to, that possibility genuinely matters.
But we're moving fast. Faster than the conversations around accountability, consent, and equity are keeping up with.
And that gap between what the technology can do and what we've actually figured out about how to use it responsibly, that's the thing I keep coming back to.
.

MOODBAND: A Wearable That Detects Children’s Emotions

David Bosah — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:01:56 +0000

With the ton of experience we have as adults, we still struggle with properly navigating and expressing our emotions and in some cases when we involve professionals(therapists and counsellors) to help us navigate these emotions. If navigating our emotions can be this difficult for us, guess the ones it is most problematic for?

Kids….

How do children explain to you that something has affected their emotions when they probably don't know what emotions are. This is where MOODBAND comes in.

Moodband is an emotion detecting smart watch for kids that is designed to translate simple biometric signals of a child to mood indication.

HOW DOES THIS TECHNOLOGY WORK?

Moodband reads the body’s natural signals to detect shifts in emotional state. It uses multiple sensor mechanisms to monitor parameters such as temperature, skin conductance, movement and heart rate variability and these signals are transmitted to an Artificial Intelligence driven emotion engine that classifies emotional state into; happy, sad, curious, anxious and excited.

These transmissions are displayed on the watch using emojis/colors, a manner that is easily understood at first glance.

Mood Emoji Color

Happy 😊 😀 🟢 Green
Sad 😢 😔 🔴 Red
Curious 🤔 🧐 🟡 Yellow
Anxious 😟 😰 ⚫ Black
Excited 🤩 🎉 🟠 Orange

For parents/guardians, there’s a companion mobile app. It stores the child's mood data securely, offering trend reports like “most stressful time of day” or “happiest during outdoor play.” The data is secure and passwords can be set in the app ensuring complete privacy and protection.

DESIGN AND SAFETY

Since the device is for children, design choices were carefully curated with care:

Soft silicone strap, hypoallergenic and comfortable.

The strap is adjustable to get the perfect size of the child's hand to avoid rashes and pain.

The overall weight is 30 g which creates good comfort and light feeling which is necessary so that the child doesn't remove it every now and then because of its weight.

THE BIG PICTURE

Moodband will lead to attainment of intimate parenting and better child management. Child counselling will be more effective and precise. More advanced models of moodbands will be introduced gradually.

Quantum Computing: The new engine for drug discovery?

David Bosah — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 22:05:22 +0000

Some people may argue that rapid technological growth in the health sector will do more harm than good. Their reason being that if we keep permitting technological advancements in medicine, humans will begin to play less role and slowly we would lose the uniqueness of human diagnostic prowess. But this article is not a case of man vs machine, rather it's a case of machine vs machine!

Over the years, classical computers have done a good job in drug discovery by analyzing and cross checking chemical substances in their molecular levels.

But there is something better…….

Quantum Computers!

Quantum computers are computers that exploit quantum mechanics phenomena. It uses the laws of quantum mechanics (theory that describes the behavior of light and matter) to perform tasks. They are faster and more efficient than classical computers in performing tasks. Even though classical computers are presently in use in drug discovery some deep research institutes/ academic institutions have started running quantum computers in the pipeline, preparing and coordinating them for future use.

Enough of the gibberish, how does this work?

Quantum computing works by Quibits instead of the regular bits that classical computers use.

Unlike regular bits that can be either 0 or 1 at a time, qubits can be 0 and 1 at the same time which is called superposition.

Another phenomenon that quantum computers possess is entanglement which is the interaction of quantum particles which are able to interact with each other no matter how distant they are.

Superposition here and entanglement there, what am I yapping?

These phenomena (entanglement and superposition) enable quantum computers to run many calculations at the same time and explore many solutions at once at incredibly high speed and efficiency.

How do you know the exact dress to purchase when you go to a boutique? You size them right? You see how they fit your body and fit whatever occasion(s) you have in mind to attend wearing them.

That's exactly what happens In the process of drug discovery, molecular interactions are analyzed which helps scientists have a full grasp of how certain substances interact at molecular level which is the foundation of drug discovery. These quantum computers do these interactions faster and better because of the phenomena explained above.

Do you feel this innovative steps will be disastrous or helpful to medicine?

MACHINE LEARNING AND ARRHYTHMIA DETECTION

David Bosah — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 21:14:35 +0000

If someone told you that a wrist watch could save your life what would be your response?

THE HEART

One of the most delicate organs in the body is the muscular organ called the HEART. An organ so important that in our entire life span it pumps blood around the body. But there are many things that could go wrong in the heart, one of which is Irregular rhythms clinically known as arrhythmia. Arrhythmia is a condition where the heart beats irregularly, too fast, or too slow. It could present with fainting episodes or severe complications like cardiac arrest or stroke.

WHAT'S MACHINE LEARNING'S BUSINESS WITH MEDICINE?

Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that uses Algorithms and data to make predictions. One of the implementations of machine learning in medicine is the innovation of smart watches that feature electrocardiogram (Tool used in measuring the heart's electrical activity) capabilities. These smart watches are embedded with data of every known possible type of normal heart rhythm. The wristwatch reads the users pulse using light sensors and quickly notifies them of any abnormal rhythm for quick rectification.

Picture this: A 50-year-old banker is out for a walk. Suddenly, his smartwatch buzzes. It has picked up a dangerous change in his heartbeat. Because he is aware something is wrong he informs his doctor. That simple alert has just prevented a possible life threatening scenario.

How Blockchain Can Prevent Life-Threatening Medical Errors

David Bosah — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 23:29:48 +0000

“She came into the clinic with a fever last week, what do
You mean her kidney is packing up?” The patient's daughter screamed at me.

How do you explain this as a doctor? How do you explain that due to a mixup In patient information you gave mismatched blood components to a patient. You see how a simple mistake like that has caused severe blood transfusion reactions that have made your patient's kidney fail?

I understand that a certain level of perfection is expected from professionals but you can't remove the fact that every professional is a human first before a professional and this applies to the health industry too. The doctor you see wasn't born a doctor but was born a human and over the course of years he/she has become a health professional.

Over the years, health care has grown and adopted several tools to ensure that mistakes like these involving patient information are avoided in day to day healthcare practice. To achieve this, there are several tools used, but for the purpose of this write up we will focus on BLOCK CHAIN.

What is Blockchain?

Block chain can be viewed as a notebook that when stuff is recorded on it, it can neither be erased or manipulated.

What role will it play in healthcare?

Blockchain is relevant in healthcare and it has already been incorporated to a little extent into health care.

The major role Blockchain aims to achieve in healthcare is better record sharing between hospitals no matter the distance involved. A Heart failure patient that takes his treatment in Chicago won't be scared of travelling to China because even if he has an episode of heart attack in Beijing the hospital there will have easy access to his medical records, drug history and every other detail needed without even placing a call to Chicago.

Lastly, drug information recorded In block chain is secure and encrypted.

Blockchain use in healthcare is still new and hasn't been explored by so many countries. With time, it will become more and more popular and useful across nations.

PYTHON BASICS: Working with input and print functions.

David Bosah — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 17:29:44 +0000

INTRODUCTION

The most basic functions to get used to in Python language are INPUT and PRINT functions. Surprisingly as simple as they seem, you need to grasp their importance and gain mastery in them to progress smoothly as a python programmer.

Let's start with a simple definition; The Print function tells you what will be displayed for the user to see. For instance, Printing (“Hello World”) means that the user sees “Hello World” on display.

On the other hand, the input function takes in given data. For instance Input (“What's your name”) means that the user is expected to answer this question with a response that will be stored and used.

PRACTICAL EXPLANATION
For better grasping of these concepts let's quickly run through a little project together. Imagine you are single(which you probably are, lmaoooo) and you decide to find a date from a dating site, picture the welcome message you will get and a possible question that will follow it; a question that intends to find out your location. Let's also assume that the site was created by an American that also expects his target audience to be Americans,

print("Welcome to the coolest dating site ever!!!")

print("We would love to know where you are from.")

date = input("United States or Overseas")

The above code will appear this way:

Welcome to the coolest dating site ever!!!
We would love to know where you are from. United States or Overseas:

The necessity of defining "date" is that in the case of using another function like the "if else" function you could easily describe the entire line of code ("United States or Overseas") as'date'.

To understand this better, let's expantiate a little and finish the code with an "if else" function that indicates that if the person is from United States, the name of the particular state in US should be requested. On the other hand if the person is from Overseas, the country the person is from should be requested.

To achieve this, this is what your code will look like:

print("Welcome to the coolest dating site ever!!!")

print("We would love to know where you are from.")

date = input("United States or Overseas")

if date == "United States":
    print("What State In USA is it:  ")
else:
    print("What country are you from:  ")

Remember that You are from the United States, So:

Welcome to the coolest dating site ever!!!
We would love to know where you are from. United States or Overseas: United States

Now you have chosen United States, the next thing you will see is:

Welcome to the coolest dating site ever!!!
We would love to know where you are from. United States or Overseas: United States
What State In USA is it:

CONCLUSION
In summary the idea of Input function is to request for information from the user while print is to display a response or even an instruction.

Technical Manual Illustration

David Bosah — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 21:33:52 +0000

Did something on technical writing with respect to technical manuals. Didn't want to use an existing product so I decided to create one in my head. The image below is an A.I illustration of the imagined product.

PRODUCT NAME- SUCREFIT; An exercise glove with a blood sugar monitoring device.

MODEL NUMBER- X-YY-ZZZ

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION
SAFETY INFORMATION
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
INSTALLATION/OPERATING PROCEDURE
MAINTENANCE
CONTACT INFORMATION

ㅡ
INTRODUCTION
This is a SUCREFIT device specially designed for diabetic(high blood sugar) or hypoglycemic (low sugar) patients that indulge in exercises ranging from light workouts to strenuous workouts. The device comes as a glove that has a glucometer that checks your blood glucose level intermittently while you work out and alerts you when they get high or low as the case may be.

ㅡ
SAFETY INFORMATION
CAUTION:
This device should be used ONLY by either clinically diagnosed diabetic or clinically diagnosed hypoglycemic patients. Don't assume your health status. Your usage of this device MUST BE subject to your doctor's approval.

WARNING:
Should be avoided by patients with BLOOD CLOTTING Issues and Patients that have LOW blood volume or ANAEMIA.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
COMPONENTS/DESCRIPTION:
-SUCREFIT GLOVE
-GLUCOMETER
-BLOOD SUGAR TEST STRIP
-LANCETS
-TEST STRIPS POUCH

ㅡ
INSTALLATION/OPERATING PROCEDURES

Charge the device for at least 90 minutes and ensure that the red indicator on the gloves has turned green indicating that the battery is fully charged.

Turn the glucometer on and adjust the settings on the screen to your preference. The major setting you should work on is the pricks/hour which controls the number of times you should be pricked every hour to monitor your blood glucose as time goes on.

Sterilize the test strip and lancets and place the strips accordingly depending on the number you will use for the workout session with respect to the setting option you selected (I.e if you plan to work out for 2 hours and you set it for 15 minutes/prick then you should set out 8 test strips.).

After Sterilizing the lancet, adjust it to the part of your hand you will prefer to be pricked. Take note that it's not painful because the lancet prick is superficial.

Ensure the Test Strip pouch is adjusted properly because that's where each strip will be deposited after use.

The glucometer beeps 5 seconds after the lancet makes a prick, indicating that the blood sugar result is ready and the result is displayed on the glucometer. A continuous beeping sound indicates the result is either low or high depending on the range you set. The standard range used is 3.9-5.9mMol/L but it should be adjusted based on what your doctor says and what values he would consider worrisome/normal

MAINTENANCE
Clean all parts of the gloves regularly except the glucometer. For the glucometer, change the battery after 6 weeks of constant usage. If you must clean the glucometer it must be with a DRY cloth.

CONTACT INFORMATION
The numbers and the email of SUCREFIT are boldly written on the cover pack of this device

ACCELERATING DEVOPS TESTING: Advanced Parallel Testing Techniques with Python

David Bosah — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:58:51 +0000

Parallel Testing:

Parallel Testing in DevOps is a technique where different tests are executed at the same time thereby improving efficiency. Parallel testing in DevOps with Python involves using frameworks and libraries from python to execute different tests at the same time.

Frame works/Tools used in DevOps parallel testing with Python:

1. Nose testing Framework.
2. Locust loading tool.
3. Pytest testing framework.
4. Behave testing framework.

Implementation of Parallel Testing In DevOps with Python.

The steps involved In DevOps parallel testing with Python are:

Install the required framework / Library. Some popular python libraries Include locust, Behave-Parallel and nose-parallel.
Write test case with the library/framework you choose.
Specify the number of parallel processes.
Run the tests in parallel.
Observe and carefully analyze results to make sure tests are passing and to confirm improved performance.