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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'."
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.