Posted on 01/09/2014 2:26:57 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Imagine a world where a handheld gadget scans your body and diagnoses illnesses in seconds - reducing hospital visits and potentially saving your life.
It may sound like the work of science fiction but engineers in California have taken their lead from the Star Trek franchise and developed a real-life version of the show’s medical tricorder.
The Scanadu Scout can read a person’s temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and more, simply being held against their forehead.
It was developed by Scanadu’s CEO Walter De Brouwer, 56, at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California.
A prototype of the Scout was first unveiled in 2012 and the latest model is on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas.
The portable electronic device contains a variety of different sensors, plus a microphone on the top of the gadget, that can read five vital signs.
These include body temperature, heart rate, oximetry (blood oxygen levels), ECG waves, heart rate variability and pulse wave transit time (PWTT) - the time it takes for a heartbeat to reach somewhere else in a person’s body. PWTT is related to blood pressure.
Its makers claim the device is 99 per cent accurate in less than 10 seconds....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Coooool
A tip of the hat to Bones McCoy. :-D
Wow! My phasers are now set on STUNNED!!
It gets vitals. Big deal. That is not a diagnosis.
It might be useful in field medicine.
The "tricorder" meme has seriously damaged the chemical analysis instrument business. The only things the funding agencies offer grants for these days are "handheld diagnostics", which are simply not possible with any technology available today. And perhaps not ever. See "lab on a chip"......which has NOT materialized in any useful form.
Note that the system in this article ONLY does physical measurements or signals that are directly electrical/magnetic.
It "is" possible today to have a system that is about the size of a shoebox, but nobody is interested in that approach, simply due to the fictional "tricorder" meme.
Amazing how much of that technology has come to pass in the years since Star Trek and its sequels were broadcast.
I’m not up on my Star Trek lore, but I thought the tricorder was used for more broad based scanning - i.e. “signs of life”.
Bones had a separate handheld medical scanner, IIRC for his diagnosing.
Or did the medical scanner interface with the tricorder?
The original communicator - a flip phone, is considered out of date and archaic now.
I wonder if you could just train a dog to sniff for disease, like they do for drugs. He wouldn’t even have to touch the patient.
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