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

[PsyMan]

I think it would work quite well in any country where healthcare is seen as a basic human right not a privilage. More importantly though, I will put up a prize fund of $10 for a fully functional holodeck that can be retrofitted to my 12' x 12' garden shed as I want to try out a new Dixon Hill program.

Re:Medical tricorder

[wisnoskij]

I think the actual diagnosis part will either have to be stripped or just considered raw data that a doctor can use to come to a diagnosis.
As it stands now we do not have any certification program to allow anything to make medical diagnosis other than a medical doctor degree, and this tricorder would never pass the exams.

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.

Re:"can diagnose up to 34 medical conditions"

[rossdee]

And 2 of those are

"He's dead, Jim"

"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it"

Re:You're right

[Antique Geekmeister]

> WTF... really? A tricorder is "just" about do-able with the tech we have now, its a first step,

Considering that most of the physics is not feasible, I suspect you're quite confused about "what is doable". Difficult if not impossible factors include:

1) Enormous stored information about numerous engineering and medical subjects to correctly identify the measured results.
2) Measurement of physical structures and energy throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, probing of remote mechanical, organic, and chemical systems without applying significant energy that would distort the system and without any destructive analysis.
3) Isolated measurement and mapping of local weather and environments internal sensors, without communicating with a larger network of devices that might provide more interpretable data.
4) The ability to differentiate biologically and without physical tissue sampling between alien races that are, nonetheless, mostly the same species since they can successfully breed.

The list goes on. One of the critical missing factors is the ability to make detailed chemical analysis without taking a sample. _Nothing_ today can do that, and there is no sign of any technology in modern research that can. Even spectral analysis without exposing the subject to a well defined light source such as a laser is limited by the overlap of the responses of similar complex spectral responses that obscure spectral response without purified samples.

Re:"can diagnose up to 34 medical conditions"

[Sad Loser]

IAAD and I work in this area.
ISO 13485 has very specific standards for any medical device that touches patients.
To get an ISO 13485 + ISO 27001 (data security) rated product with software is going to take $500k to get to the stage where you can pilot and go for second round funding.

There are all sorts of really good sounding projects out there
http://www.oxehealth.com/
http://intelligentultrasound.c...

I have found that it is easy to show that a product works in optimum conditions e.g. with people who will stay still and not move about, but put a lot of these technologies into real life situations and the data they output is landfill quality.

This is one of the really annoying things - we have politicians who think that Joe average is going to upload the data from their heart monitor and we are going to stop him going to the Emergency Department.
The diagnosis I make is only as good as the data I base that on. That is why Apple has pulled all its apps with medical claims. The consequences of misdiagnosis due to poor data mean a PR disaster on the scale of Volkswagen diesels.

I am not saying that some of this stuff is impossible, but don't expect too much too soon, and if the device and software are not certified, I cannot use them in my practice so they are just shiny paperweights.