Rypinski is the leader of Aezon, one of the teams participating in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. The competition launched in 2012, when the XPrize Foundation and U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm challenged innovators from around the world to develop a portable, consumer-friendly device capable of diagnosing a comprehensive set of medical conditions. More than 300 teams registered, and after a series of reviews, the organizers selected 10 finalists, announced last August.
This month, the final phase of the competition starts. Each finalist team was expected to deliver 30 working prototypes, which will now undergo a battery of tests with real patients. Prizes totaling US $10 million will go to the winner and two runners-up, to be announced early next year, when "Star Trek" will be celebrating its 50th anniversary.
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Their tricorders won't be all-powerful portable scanners like those in "Star Trek," but they still must demonstrate some impressive capabilities. They'll have to diagnose 13 medical conditions, including anemia, diabetes, hepatitis A, leukocytosis, pneumonia, stroke, tuberculosis, and urinary tract infections. In addition, teams choose three additional conditions from a list that includes food-borne illness, melanoma, osteoporosis, whooping cough, shingles, mononucleosis, strep throat, and HIV. And their systems must be able to monitor vital signs like temperature, blood pressure and oxygen saturation, heart rate, and respiratory rate—not only in real time but for periods of several days as well.
Smartphones already seem pretty close to tricorders.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:31AM
In case no one has said this yet... I'm a Doctor not a bricklayer! Kudos to those who can come up with this kind of stuff in software, I'm strictly a hardware type of person and have no idea how to do this kind of stuff. Give me a schematic and I'll build it for you, give me the code and I can burn the chips for you, but please don't ask me to write code, my brain just can't function like that. Some folks folks were meant to code and some were meant to build the hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:36AM
I hope you can do more than that. A pick and place readily replaces what you have written. Surely you can do much more than a machine that can only follow instructions.