Scientists Win $2.6 Million For Star Trek Tricorder Device (vocativ.com)

The Qualcomm Foundation, along with the XPRIZE Foundation, "announced the winning team of its nearly four-year-long global competition to develop a functional, easily usable tricorder," reports Vocativ. The Pennsylvania-based Final Frontier Medical Devices team was the first place winner, receiving the top prize of $2.6 million, while Boston-based Dynamical Biomarkers nabbed $1 million. From the report: Led by Dr. Basil Harris, a Philadelphia emergency room physician, the team was mostly made out of family and friends Harris coaxed into volunteering their free time on the weekend. By contrast, Dynamical Biomarkers had 50 scientists and programmers, mostly paid, and was sponsored by the Taiwanese government and Taiwan-based cellphone company HTC. The device kit developed by Final Frontier, called DxtER, uses non-invasive sensors that collect data from the user and combines that with an AI frontloaded with information in the field of clinical emergency medicine to come with a diagnosis. The device currently operates on an iPad tablet, but future versions should work equally fine on a smartphone as well. The device, ideally, would allow patients to then send their readings to their doctors so they could collaborate on their health care. According to an interview Harris held with the Washington Post, DxtER can diagnose up to 34 medical conditions in its present design. The device developed by Dynamical Biomarkers could reach up to 50, team leader and Harvard Medical School professor Chung-Kang Peng, told the Post, given it surpasses the five-pound weight limit imposed by the competition guidelines.

Comments

Medical tricorder

[Okian Warrior]

The competition appears to be for a medical tricorder.

(There are legitimate science tricorder projects as well.)

Fifty-ish medical conditions is a very good start, and I can only imagine that adding more and different sensors will allow such a system to discriminate between more conditions in the future (do these devices ask for human input of symptoms or history?).

Of course, we could never get these approved for use in the USA - the 3.8 million noted in the article would only be a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of certification. If a single drug costs $2.5 billion for certification (and hearing aids cost $5000 and up), imagine how much it would cost to certify an autodoc for 50 diseases!

But this should work quite well in developing countries.

Re:Medical tricorder

[Actually, I do RTFA]

If a single drug costs $2.5 billion for certification

That would be a very different world.

You are misreading an article that was misrestating research. First, half that value just imputed from the long time between patent and approval - this was greatly exacerbated by drug companies moving to filing patents very early in the R&D cycle. In other words, $1.2B was actually just lost profits some guy thought companies should have. But, really you could just as easily claim that limited patents, instead of longer ones cost $1.2B. What it really implies is that most drug research is so uninovative that its a race to the patent office. That's a good thing for everyone. For the $1.4B of development and testing cost, with most of the money going to testing early on.

And, for fun, your anti-FDA point falls down, as this was a worldwide survey.