Introducing Vein Pilot, a solution for finding your veins so you can NOT stick them.

Wait, what?

Most people who want to find their veins do so in order to administer medications that are intravenous (in their veins). I remember getting an infusion and having a nurse who preferred using a vein finder light. It was fancy: it displayed a red light on a rectangle of skin and the veins showed up as darkly colored, so it was very easy to assess them.

Fast forward to more recently when I’m trying to do a home subcutaneous infusion, with several needle sites, every week. At one point, I had inserted a needle and then realized blood was flowing up the tube. Oops, hit a vein. I had to pull that site out and not use it for administering the medication. (And, as someone who is a delightful bruiser, I had quite the bruise for weeks).

This made me nervous knowing that could happen again, because my needles/sites are split from the same set of tubing, and if I hit a vein and have to pull one out, I have wasted that needle/site and it then messes up how I would do the rest of my infusion. It would require additional time and using a full other set of infusion needles, since I can only administer so much per site and dropping one site would put the others over the limit. That means then I have to figure out how to split the cartridges across the remaining sites and keep a cartridge or two to split over another set of sites. This costs an extra hour of time, a backup set of sites (which luckily I have but not everyone has backups) AND causes additional ‘lump’ risk post-infusion (because every needle causes trauma to the tissues that about a third of the time leaves a loose or consolidated lump that can take anywhere from one to a bunch of weeks to go away.) So this nervousness isn’t “I have to stick another needle in!” but a more complex, nested “I have to rethink and redesign this infusion and it’s non-optimal, time-consuming, and has long-term post-infusion impacts, too”. It’s a risk for every single needle which is multiple per week, every week, for the foreseeable future. (Although it’s only happened 1/88 so far…)

As a result, I became very cautious about trying to see where the veins were in the areas I was trying to infuse in, but this is challenging. I have limited areas to infuse in, because I can’t reach some areas that are allowed – and also because I have to juggle real estate for my insulin pump, which also infuses into subcutaneous tissue, and CGM. This leaves my outer thighs, my inner thighs, and my abdomen as possible infusion sites that I can actually reach for these bigger volume infusions. And…these thigh/abdomen zones have a lot of veins. It’s not always easy to see them, depending on the light or how I’m positioned, but I definitely want to avoid them.

I started venting to myself the other day about the situation – limited real estate, lean areas that are hard to infuse in that further limit where on the thighs and abdomen I can comfortably infuse in, plus the veins limit the real estate further and cause additional stress at the time I’m going to insert the sites. Ugh! But, one thing I’ve gotten progressively better at is trying to categorize which of the things that are bothering me are modifiable. Maybe not “fixable” completely, but could they be modified to be a little bit better? I have a lot of experience now doing this with software solutions (PERT Pilot, MacrosOnTheRun, spreadsheets galore, Baseline Pilot, Book Pilot, etc. – many of my ‘software-shaped feelings’) but I also increasingly, thanks to LLMs, have started to consider physical, hardware solutions for things, too.

It’s not my default skillset, so I don’t always think about it, but in this scenario I remembered and was thinking through the light that the nurse used. I looked it up, thinking maybe I could buy one (or insurance might rent one). LOL, nope: these things are $2000+. But I looked into how they work – by shining light, identifying the contrast, then displaying a dark ‘map’ of the veins back. That helped me realize that the consumer grade “solutions” that are shining a light aren’t doing quite the same thing. I also looked at the reviews for the consumer grade options, and they are terrible for the $200 devices. Plus the shape didn’t seem like it would be usable for my use case. I tried to see if anyone had made DIY versions that were better, and there were a few 3D printed type devices that you add light strips into, and that made me think – could I try to build one?

Same lights, different purpose.

I ended up brainstorming something more simple than the ‘vein finder’ DIY projects. Their goal is to find the veins to stick them directly – I want to avoid them! But maybe the lights could be used similarly.

Instead of a “circle” (or open circle) which most of them are designed around, I decided I wanted to try a simple ‘fork’ or a rectangle (with light strips on two sides and the ends blocked) to position light pointing inward to a spot, to try to illuminate the tissue so I could see the veins more clearly than with bare eyes and room light. My LLM brainstorming partners had suggested using a combination of red + amber lights. I decided I would buy cheap light strips (you can find them in the range of $5-20 depending on length, color, etc.) and see if they worked, then iterate on a 3D printed type ‘fork’ or rectangle to use to help limit light leakage away from the area I was trying to illuminate. But I never ended up finishing iterating because…

I bought red light strips ($5 set) and amber (orange, $13 set) light strips. I got them and plugged them in to the 12-volt dimmer switch we happened to have, plus some light strip LED strip-to-wire connectors. (We originally got and had these connectors when we put up bright white LED light strips in our closet to add closet lighting. Having these on hand made it so I only had to buy the new colored light strips to prototype this idea, otherwise I would’ve bought the dimmer and strip-to-wire connectors.)

I first took the red light and put it against my leg. It didn’t really help, I couldn’t see the veins well. I couldn’t tell if that’s because I didn’t have it set up in the intended fork design – a light on each side, slightly angled inward, with tape on the outside to limit light leakage – or if the red light was non-optimal for lighting up my skin or if it’s the particular design of the light strip I had gotten.

I tried the amber (orange) light next, expecting it also to not work for the same reasons but, as I moved it across my leg, I SAW THE VEINS! They were dark. It is actually the *motion* of the light that helps, because my eyes then ‘see’ the dark vein based on the light moving, so my eyes pick up on the dark ‘line’ of the vein on either side of the light strip as it moves. By moving it over an area in different directions, I can pick out a vein, then move the light and watch for other veins nearby.

Sometimes the veins fork and I can see a good spot in the “V” of two veins, or similarly they look like they’re running in parallel to each other and I can see where there’s a good spot in between. I dim or turn off the light, holding my finger in the ‘good’ zone and look on my bare skin for freckles or marks to help keep track of this location. (I could mark it with a skin-safe marker, but I have to scrub the skin with an alcohol swab before infusing and I assume that would remove the mark, so I need other landmarks to use regardless.) I can then swab/scrub it, wait for it to dry, then place the needle.

I tried it for the first time this week. I had chosen two abdomen sites and two inner thigh sites. I didn’t actually use it with both abdomen sites, because I tried the light strip with the first side of my abdomen and didn’t see anything. That could be because the light strip is currently still too long (I need to cut and shorten it for easier handling); because of the angle of my view down on my abdomen I can’t really see both sides of the light against the skin – I only see one side; or because there weren’t any surface level veins right there. So I didn’t try with my other abdomen side, either. But I did use it with both of my inner thigh sites and it was so much easier and less stress to use it to pick an area I thought I wanted to use (generally); check the area for the nearest veins, then narrow down the exact spot I wanted to target and use.

Woohoo, less stress!

If anyone ran into this post because you are looking for finding your veins so you can stick them – it would work for that, too. You’d probably want to play around with an actual 3D printed (or even popsicle sticks) structure for the lights so you could try to keep the lights in the spot and keep the vein highlighted. In my use case, I am trying to AVOID hitting the veins and don’t need to keep it highlighted beyond figuring out where they are and picking my spot. (Then I move the lights away so I can clean the site and insert, which I couldn’t do with anything within 3-4 inches of the site, because of how I hold my hand to insert this needle at a 90 degree angle – it’s different from IV access angles.) You may get benefit out of using different combinations of colored lights and orienting them differently than I do.

But if you’re like me, want to AVOID veins, an amber/orange light strip and moving it around may be good enough for this purpose. You could iterate on different shapes/structures to hold the lights, but since a single amber light strip and the motion of it works for my use case, I haven’t iterated (yet) on a better design that would improve it.