Actor Karl Urban played the part of a young Dr. Bones McCoy in the movie "Star Trek 9."
In the future, you’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong with you (or your child) simply by scanning them with your cell phone. In the present, two companies are racing to make the first prototype.
The medical tricorder, a handheld device in the Star Trek universe used to diagnose diseases and keep track of vital signs, once seemed a sci-fi impossibility alongside teleportation and alien encounters. Not anymore. The $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, officially announced this week, challenges entrants to create mobile platform that can accurately diagnose 15 diseases across 30 patients in three days. We caught up with two startups--Senstore and Scanadu--that think they can pull it off.
Scanadu has been working on a non-invasive, non-contact, non-sampling (no saliva, urine, stool sample necessary) tricorder since before the X Prize challenge was announced. The startup, which raised $2 million in November, was only founded last January. But co-founder Walter De Brouwer set up a research lab in Belgium--Starlab--in the late 1990s, where he prototyped a tricorder-like device. It was too far ahead of its time. Scanadu co-founder and COO Misha Chellam explains.
"It was the size of a backpack. It was an interesting idea but not really workable."
Then, in 2006, De Brouwer’s son suffered from a traumatic brain injury and was hospitalized for three months. The tricorder idea resurfaced. This time, De Brouwer, Chellam, and the rest of the nine-person Scanadu team (including two ex-NASA scientists and three bioengineers), are working on a sensor-filled medical tricorder that can be integrated into a smartphone.
The tricorder can be viewed broken into a few component pieces:
- Biological sensor input (i.e. exhaling your breath to allow the chemical components to be analyzed).
- Vital signs - Heart beat, blood pressure and temperature.
- Imaging components (used to identify a rash, for example).
- AI software that can make sense of all the inputs.
Chellam claims that a prototype will be ready by the end of 2012, and a commercial device will be ready in three years. How can Scanadu build such a futuristic concept so quickly? Much of the technology is already available or in the works--it’s mostly a matter of getting FDA approval, gaining consumer trust, and, of course, putting it all together without draining the smartphone’s battery,
Scanadu plans to first market the device to parents who want to manage their children’s health. The device--which Chellam speculates could cost around $199--could, for example, be used to detect whether an infection is bacterial or viral and monitor temperature while the user is asleep.
Despite its quick pace of development, Scanadu is still looking to collaborate. Chellam says.
"There’s a lot of innovation in this space, and we certainly don’t think we can build this thing on our own."
That brings us to Senstore, another startup that’s working on a medical tricorder--but one that will be open source. Senstore got its start at Singularity University's 2011 summer graduate program, where the current Senstore team took on the challenge of using sensor technology to solve global health problems.
The team was inspired by a Singularity University talk from Chris Anderson of DIY Drones, a community of thousands of enthusiasts working on unmanned aerial vehicles. Notes Senstore co-founder Rachel Kamar.
"It’s easy to see why people would want to build drones because playing with quadcopters is fun. We were less convinced that people would be interested in hacking our tools for health. We spent a lot of time trying to validate that."
Whereas Scanadu is building its tricorder in house, Senstore is creating a platform where people can collect sensor data and apply diagnostic algorithms. Kalmar says.
"The idea is that people closest to problems are going to have a set of tools that make it easy for them to prototype solutions."
It’s possible, then, that people will build multiple versions of the tricorder on top of Senstore’s platform--perhaps a malaria-specific tricorder or a tuberculosis tricorder.
Unlike Scanadu, Senstore probably won’t have a true tricorder prototype ready by the end of 2012. But the startup was recently accepted to the Rock Health accelerator, and in the spring, Senstore plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign to build something "a little more consumer oriented, making it easy for people to get data from wearable sensors and stream it to the cloud," explains Kamar. Senstore hopes to have sensor kits available for people to experiment with by May.
It’s all a stepping stone along the path to creating a tricorder. When a polished version is finally built, don’t be surprised if it’s a mishmash of ideas from both Scanadu and Senstore. Kalmar says.
"We would like to collaborate."
A sickbay (see below) that uses space-age technology to diagnose diseases ranging from stomach bugs to cancer has been unveiled at a British hospital.
The first of its kind, it contains a bewildering array of equipment, including probes designed for missions to Mars.
The gadgets in the million-pound unit can detect illness without the need for painful and invasive tests. They combine information about the sight, smell and ‘feel’ of a disease to produce a diagnosis.
The unit is described as the first step towards the tricorder scanners that Star Trek’s Dr McCoy waved in front of patients’ bodies to diagnose and treat illness in the crew of the Starship Enterprise.
COMMENTARY: Launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, $10 million Qualcomm Tricoder X Prize is designed to challenge researches to come up with the technology or tricorder that is capable of diagnosing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases” from the sick and must be light enough for a person to carry, so a maximum weight of 5lb (2.2kg) has been set.
I have a feeling that we will be seeing a variety of medical diagnostic and biofeedback apps running on today's mobile devices like smartphones and tablets carrying out the functions of a medical tricorder. Diagnostic sensors could be connected to the mobile device, and those sensors making contact with the patients skin to record vitals and make other pathogenic diagnosis. Being able to diagnose 15 diseases on one device will be the challenging part.
In Star Trek, the medical tricorder is technology that belongs to the 23rd Century. It was a device used by Dr. McCoy, Spock and his medical/science team as far back as the first episodes, giving the crew the ability to diagnose a patient by scanning his physical body.
Similar such devices already exist but not in such a small form. Prof. Jeremy Nicholson, the head of department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London said to the BBC that the devices that exist now detect chemical signs of illness to aid patient diagnosis and claims creating one that is Trek-like tricorder size is a huge challenge and doesn’t think anyone will be able to achieve it.
Professor Nicholson said.
“The most likely sort of technology would be something that detects metabolites. What we use in our laboratory is big – the size of a Mini. The challenge is sticking it all into one device."
As a final tribute to Star Trek, here's a short video clip of actor Karl Urban as Dr. Bones McCoy in Star Trek 9.
Here's a very interesting background video of Karl Urban and how he more than measured up with DeForrest Kelly's "Dr Bones McCoy" in the original television Star Trek series. Actor Chris Pine, who played cadet James T. Kirk said that Urban's Dr. McCoy role was "spot on." I agree.
Courtesy of an article dated January 12, 2012 appearing in Fast Company and an article dated January 12, 2012 appearing in What Culture and an article dated September 1, 2011 appearing in Mail Online
I'm gone to inform my little brother, that he should also pay a quick visit this weblog on regular basis to get updated from most up-to-date news update.
Posted by: Relationship Therapist | 07/29/2012 at 03:00 PM