Do Your Hands Sweat Too Much? This Device Can Help!

I have a condition called hyperhidrosis, which causes excessive sweating. In my case, it’s on my hands and feet. Sweaty feet are irritating, but sweaty hands are downright embarrassing — particularly when I’m obligated to shake someone’s hand or I’m an *ahem* intimate situation. Sweaty hands also make it difficult to use touchscreens and touch pads, which is a big issue with today’s technology. So, I designed Sweat Fighter to treat the problem, and you can build one yourself for about $30 if you suffer from hyperhidrosis as well!

Sweat Fighter is a small iontophoresis device for treating hyperhidrosis on hands and feet. It works by passing a small amount of electricity through water and into your hands. As the electricity enters your skin it carries minerals from the water into your pores, which clogs them and, over time, stops sweating. It may sound like pseudoscience, but it’s a real treatment that I’ve had a lot of success with.

You may have heard of DIY iontophoresis machines before, and it’s easy to construct one by simply attaching a 12V power supply to two pans of water. Sweat Fighter simply adds two convenience features. First, it has a timer so you can just set it and wait for the treatment to finish. Second, it automatically reverses the polarity during the process so both hands are treated equally.

The device has four major components: an Arduino Nano 5V for control, an L298N dual H-bridge motor driver, an I2C OLED display, and a custom PCB to tie those all together. That dual H-bridge is how Sweat Fighter is able to reverse the polarity in the circuit, and the OLED display shows you the progress of the treatment cycle. That all fits inside a compact 3D-printed enclosure that looks a bit nicer than a typical DIY iontophoresis setup.

I’ve entered this project into the Instructables First Time Author Contest, so consider voting for it! (just scroll to the bottom of the tutorial.)