News Qualcomm offers $10 million for working Tricorder

I know I'm supposed to write something all professional here, but heck, this is my favourite news story in ages...

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2012/01/13/qualcomm-tricorder/1

 

Well we already have the needle-less syringes, hend-held communicators, tablets and touch screen controls and soon we [may] have the tricorder...

what Star Trek teach are they going to try and recreate next? my guess may be the replicator

 

Except that even we we focused all of the sun's power on one spot, that wouldn't be enough energy to even make an ounce of matter.

 

Seven of Nine would be the best technology to replicate ... ziiiip

 

I didn't mean one working *exactly* the same way as in ST which never *made* matter, they create stuff using a pool of resources with any leftovers [broken items, leftover food etc.] put back into the device and de constituted and returned to that resource pool. </ST nerd>

Plus the replicator could be summed up as a [albeit advanced] vending machine... and we already have those...

The [real world] thing that sprang to mind and made me think 'replicator' was the lab grown 'meat'.

 

A replicator doesn't make matter, it reorders matter.

IIRC from my geeky youth, it used teleportation technology (which already exists to some extent, we've managed Quantum teleportation, and in 1998 IBM successfully teleported a photon) to change bonds and re-order matter into something else.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/8...-teleportation-across-a-distance-of-10-miles/

 

Hmmmm, this is going to be almost impossible. The human body is a highly complex, and variable, entity. Diagnosis is rarely an exact art, especially with pathologies. Trauma would be relatively simple given the disruption to healthy tissues. A space occupying lesion (lump, put very simply) takes a certain amount of imaging and biopsy before diagnoses can be accurately given. A lot of pathologies overlap so much in their 'typical' presentation it can be extremely difficult to make an accurate diagnoses even with modern imaging and blood analysis.

One persons symptoms doesn't always represent everybodies symptoms. For instance, I have a patient who had her thyroid removed. Typically, her symptoms prior to removal would be insomnia, insatiable appetite, weight loss, emotional lability.. the list goes on. All she had was occasional tingling in hands and feet. Blood pressure was normal, everything was normal apart from an elevated thyroid hormone.

No machine, no matter how clever, will be able to replace an experienced clinician fully. They lack the intuition and only play a numbers game.

 

again, you're assuming they want a device that's exactly like in star trek, that can diagnose just about anything. They're after a device that can detect a small list of things [and these most likely produce easily identifiable antibodies/symptoms/whatever that are easily attributable to the illness]. Most of the tech required is probably already available, the 'trick' will be condensing it all into a hand-held device.

Plus even the givers of the prize aren't expecting a 'winner' any time soon.

 

If a tricorder gave a diagnosis, they wouldn't have a doctor on starships. It's just a diagnostic tool, like a blood pressure cuff, or a heart rate monitor.

And yes, I know its just a tv program.

 

I always thought it was a documentary sent from the future (possibly using Borg technology)

 

15 min of fame

 

why the "trained " i see uses a laptop askng questions fron it while filling in the diagnostic part fron the simple instrument scale cuff etc... the diag. equipment is available in any drug store. it's going to happen..get outta the way

 

Sounds ambitious, but I can think of ten million motivating reasons to try it. For myself, I'll stick to writing fiction in the hopes of making my fortune down that path.