Star Trek's Design Influence On Palm, New Tech

kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a fun article describing how many of the inventions of Star Trek have made early appearances, 2 centuries ahead of Captain Kirk's time. They talk with one of Palm's UI designers, who admits that '...my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels', and also notes: 'When we designed the first Treo... it had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series. It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk'."

Comments

Re:missed this one?

[djh101010]

Temperature and heart rate should be easy - infrared pyrometers are used in industry to measure, with accuracy, the temperature of a surface, no reason it shouldn't work to point it at a person & get a number. Heart rate - several optical ways, no problem, or a directional microphone and appropraite sound processing - again, nothing too complicated.

Blood pressure, though...since BP is measured by finding the two points where (1) the pressure in the cuff blocks all flow, and (2) the pressure in the cuff blocks no flow, I can't see an easy way to get that without actually blocking and unblocking said flow.

Non-inavsive blood pressure systems work by "listening" to the pulse with a pressure transducer & working some fairly mundane math to get the numbers, but I just can't see a way to find out how much pressure it takes to occlude a blood vessel without...occluding that blood vessel.

Re:Speaking of medical tech

[grub]

They already have units that blast the medicine/vaccine through the skin at high pressure. They're mainly used when they have to process a lot of people in a short time.

Needle-less shots PREDATED Star Trek

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Spray hypodermics predated the Star Trek series. McCoy's injector was based on them - though of course vastly improved. (Dial-a-drug, hand-held rather than big gun with compressor sidekick, etc.)

The original discovery was made when a worker handled a high-pressure hydraulic hose with a pinhole leak, and reported to medical with a sore spot in his hand. The medic found a teaspoon or so of hydraulic fluid under the skin - but the worker hadn't felt it going in. Investigation quickly identified the leak and thus resulted in the discovery that a very small, very high-speed, jet of fluid will go subcutaneous or even intramusclular with minimal sensation.

Somehow this info didn't get lost, but resulted in the bright idea of doing it deliberately to reduce the discomfort and increase the speed and convenience of injections - especially mass injections. The military funded development of the first devices (primarily because they have to innoculate thousands of troops in batches efficiently, and also so they could innoculate a civilian population rapidly in case of a biowar attack - this being during the "cold war".)