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Submitted via IRC for Cmn32480
Oscar Wilde once said that life imitates art, and science and engineering is often no exception to this. Science fiction certainly provides science types with plenty of inspiration for inventions, including holograms, teleportation, and even sonic screwdrivers.
Star Trek's all-purpose medical device, the Tricorder, has also inspired a fair few people to recreate its near-magical ability to instantly diagnose a patient. As it happens, the non-profit X-Prize Foundation were so keen to get one invented that they started a global competition to see if any mavericks would succeed.
Rather remarkably, one team has emerged victorious in their endeavor. A family-led team from Pennsylvania, appropriately named Final Frontier Medical Devices, have bagged themselves a sum of $2.5 million, with a second-place prize of $1 million going to the Taiwan-based Dynamical Biomarkers Group.
The objective of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition was to create a lightweight, non-invasive, handheld device that can identify 13 health conditions (12 diseases, and the very absence of disease) in 90 minutes to 24 hours with no additional help or counsel from medical professionals. Five vital health metrics, like heartbeat and respiratory function, were also required to be constantly monitored.
Source: IFLScience!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @08:29AM (2 children)
I've got blue balls for green skinned females.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:09AM (1 child)
Boner scan complete. It's dead, Jim.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:10AM
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday April 16 2017, @08:46AM (4 children)
Nice try, but it is nothing like a real Tricorder...
Good start, yes, perhaps, however....
Continuing to try to marketingly-persuade people into calling these Star-Trek style Tricorders is about as cromulent as calling the current "hoverboards" hoverboards!! :facepalm:
The Segway without a handlebar stick is NOT a hoverboard and this medical Tricorder is NOT a Tricorder, medical or otherwise, as nifty as the tech may be at this point....
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:00AM (1 child)
It is true that the device is non-invasive but it appears to require sensors attached to dongles, which means putting wires on you -- not exactly the way a hand-wavey tricorder works.
But still, it's a step in the right direction, especially because it's basically a tablet (which provides the flexibility of off-the-shelf hardware).
Anyway, you sound kind of salty. Not all of us can be engineer-doctor alpha-males.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:13PM
Finally... I told ye they'll patch it [xkcd.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @11:49AM
It's also not official until licensing fees have been paid for the name.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:50PM
However if one can skip the rule of non-invasive then it can be useful to deal with disease in space where the nearest hospital is FAR away. That's where devices like this become really useful.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:55AM
Facebook is a social disease.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday April 16 2017, @11:52AM (2 children)
can identify 13 health conditions (12 diseases, and the very absence of disease)
I assume that means the very absence of any of the 12 specific diseases (the article says "absence of conditions").
Sounds a bit of a cheat to call an absence a 13th "health condition." Why not say it can identify 4096 conditions, that is to say each combination of 12 diseases?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 17 2017, @08:47AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday April 17 2017, @09:44AM
Shows you the most serious, needs an in-app payment to show the rest.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday April 16 2017, @09:15PM
The computer in my pocket can identify a few thousand different terminal cancers and incurable degenerative diseases, all of which it believes I certainly have based on the skin rash I describe.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)
Spock (or Bones) pick up his Tricorder and 90 minutes or 24h later they are done, that would be some riveting must-see-TV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @11:59PM
It's the best you can do with stone knives and bear skins.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday April 17 2017, @02:14AM
My understanding was that cell-phones now make good tricorders if not for industrial protectionism [geek.com] (obnoxious JS warning)