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First Prototype of a Working Tricorder Unveiled At SXSW
the_newsbeagle writes The $10 million Tricorder X-prize is getting to the "put up or shut up" stage: The 10 finalists must turn in their working devices on June 1st for consumer testing. At SXSW last week, the finalist team Cloud DX showed off its prototype, which includes a wearable collar, a base station, a blood-testing stick, and a scanning wand. From the article: "The XPrize is partnering with the medical center at the University of California, San Diego on that consumer testing, since it requires recruiting more than 400 people with a variety of medical conditions. Grant Campany, director of the Tricorder XPrize, said he’s looking forward to getting those devices into real patients hands. 'This will be a practical demonstration of what the future of medicine will be like,' said Campany at that same SXSW talk, 'so we can scale it up after competition.'"
Tricorder? Medical Tricorder!
Please state the nature of the medical emergency...
The X-Prize competition decides what a Tricorder is. Their guidelines are here: http://tricorder.xprize.org/si...
The contest requirements are very specific on the device's testing capabilities, here they are:
The Core Set (Qualifying requires 5/13, Final Round requires all 13):
1. Anemia
2. Urinary tract infection, lower
3. Diabetes
4. Atrial fibrillation
5. Stroke
6. Sleep apnea, obstructive
7. Tuberculosis
8. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
9. Pneumonia
10. Otitis ("ear infection")
11. Leukocytosis
12. Hepatitis A
13. Absence of Core Conditions
The Elective Set (Qualifying requires 1, Final Round requires 3):
1. Pertussis (Whooping Cough)
2. Hypertension
3. Mononucleosis
4. Allergens (airborne)
5. Hypothyroidism/hyperthyroidism
6. Food-borne illness
7. Shingles
8. Melanoma
9. Strep throat
10. Cholesterol Screen
11. HIV Screen
12. Osteoporosis
The Vital Signs Set (Qualifying requires 3, Final Round requires all 5):
1. Blood pressure
2. Electrocardiography (heart rate/variability)
3. Body temperature
4. Respiratory rate
5. Oxygen Saturation
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Of course, I don't think any of us would want to be exposed to a working Tricorder -- they worked by bombarding the subject with EM radiation, including a bunch in the "radioactive" spectrum. In real life, the thing was likely to diagnose you as being in the early stages of cancer due to the tricorder itself..
Did they? I missed that episode.
I always thought that the ideal tricorder could accept a broad spectrum of natural radiations in 3 dimensions and use that to construct a bio-chemical-mechanical model of the subject. Thus the name "tricorder" being equally used for both medical purposes (medical tricorder) and general exploration (for example, Spock's tricorder).
Think about it. Every nanosecond we are being constantly bombarded by radio waves from Jupiter, the Sun, and the stars, cosmic rays, neutrinos, natural radioactivity from the ground we stand on and the air we breathe, light at various frequencies, including UV and IR, sound waves of all frequencies and that's not even factoring in man-made stuff like WKRP AM/FM, the local police/fire/rescue/transportation/etc and business channels or cell phones. Some of that stuff goes straight through, some reflects and/or refracts, some is absorbed selectively by various tissues, some is blocked. All you need is sensors, a computer powerful enough to correlate it, and software that can reduce it to usable data.