Unless you’ve been blessed with the Herculean veins of Arnold Schwarzeneggar, you probably don’t look forward to having your blood drawn. While it might never be a desirable experience, future blood tests should be a significantly less-threatening ordeal for all hemophobes, thanks to the work of Gunnar Lovhoiden, professor of engineering at Andrews University .

In his recently-completed Ph.D. project, Lovhoiden successfully designed a device that enables medical professionals to detect usable veins in 94 percent of all difficult intravenous cases. The device, named OnTarget, beams infrared light into a patient’s skin, and utilizes the differing absorption properties of veins and surrounding tissue to create a real time “map” of the subdermal region. This image is then captured, processed, and projected back onto the patient’s skin, showing precisely where blood vessels lie. OnTarget is already sending shockwaves through the bioengineering community, and Lovhoiden now sits as a minority shareholder on the Board of Directors for Conenhill, a company seeking to produce commercial units of the device.

Not bad for a man who, as a youth in Norway, resolved to do “anything but teach,” and much preferred things like cross-country skiing to engineering. Lovhoiden, now twenty years wiser, admits that his post in engineering academia is a “perfect fit,”and as you listen to him elucidate the intricacies of OnTarget, you realize that he’s right. Teaching comes as naturally as cross-country skiing for this Norwegian.

Aaron Beaumont, University Relations student news writer