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Lady_Satine
Title: Head of Lexian R&D
Joined: Oct 15 2005
Location: Metro area, Georgia
Posts: 7287
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Fancy getting your hands on $10 million? Of course you do. Then just grab a tool kit and build a working Star Trek-style medical tricorder. Simples.
The X Prize Foundation, famed for innovative big-prize challenges in technical advancement, has outlined its next contest: make an all-purpose mobile device that can do a doctor's work better than a medical professional.
The Foundation, in collaboration with Qualcomm, has put up a $10m (£6.5m) prize to help the winner develop the tricorder, which should combine a range of tech from wireless sensors to medical imaging and microfluidics.
The device must provide a quick assessment of a patient's health issues and provide a comparable diagnosis to that presented by a panel of board-certified physicians. A patient would have to breathe, bleed or pee into the device, which would be used to produce an initial opinion.
The idea is to "bring understandable, easily accessible health information and metrics to consumers on their mobile devices, pointing them to earlier actions for care”.
The competition's rules have yet to be formalised, but the Tricorder X-Prize competition will launch in early 2012.
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 "Life is a waste of time. Time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time, and you'll have the time of your life!" |
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GPFontaine
Joined: Dec 06 2007
Location: Connecticut
Posts: 11244
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I definitely thought that this was something else. I was thinking somehow 3 video cameras mashed together... I could do that. Alas, this is some form of insane miracle medical device similar to the one they use on dead bodies in CSI NY.
I'll be perfectly honest, $10,000,000,000 is too low of a prize for something that is this good at medicine. Especially if it is a mobile device.
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Pandajuice
Title: The Power of Grayskull
Joined: Oct 30 2008
Location: US and UK
Posts: 2649
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I don't think it'd be that difficult really. The medical tricorder is really just a portable X-ray and CT/MRI scanner. All one would have to do is figure out how to miniaturize those technologies.
It is a bit silly that one of the requirements is that the device has to make the diagnosis because tricorders didn't do that. They just gave the doctor all the info he/she needed to make their diagnosis.
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Knyte
2010 SLF Tag Champ*
Title: Curator Of The VGM
Joined: Nov 01 2006
Location: Here I am.
Posts: 6749
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Not entirely true. In TNG, the medical tricorder would tell the user if the patient had any diseases, aliments, or infections as well as just give vitals.
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Pandajuice
Title: The Power of Grayskull
Joined: Oct 30 2008
Location: US and UK
Posts: 2649
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Did it actually print the disease out onto the screen or was it Dr. Crusher making a diagnosis from the information given? I always assumed it was her because if the tricorder could make diagnoses all by itself, why do they need doctors at all?
With a portable x-ray/CT scanner/MRI/blood tester, a doctor could very easily diagnose most diseases, ailments, and infections so that's what's really needed in reality, not some magical diagnosis machine.
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Knyte
2010 SLF Tag Champ*
Title: Curator Of The VGM
Joined: Nov 01 2006
Location: Here I am.
Posts: 6749
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| Pandajuice wrote: |
| because if the tricorder could make diagnoses all by itself, why do they need doctors at all? |
See: Emergency Medical Hologram
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Drew Linky
Wizard
Joined: Jun 12 2009
Posts: 4209
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This got geeky really fast.
More seriously, I like this idea.
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https://discord.gg/homestuck is where you can find me literally 99% of the time. Stop on by if you feel like it, we're a nice crowd. |
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Etch
Title: Intermittent Scribbler
Joined: Mar 15 2011
Location: Texas
Posts: 588
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$10 million is a pretty lame prize for something like this.
Especially since $10 million is what they will probably charge, minimum, for one of these thing in production.
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