$10M Tricorder X PRIZE Kicks off 111
Back in May, we heard about Qualcomm's plans to hammer out details for an X PRIZE competition to invent a Star Trek-style tricorder. Now, reader Sven-Erik sends word that the requirements have been finalized and the competition has launched.
"As envisioned for this competition, the device will be a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases. Metrics for health could include such elements as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. Ultimately, this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements. Given that each team will take its own approach to design and functionality, the device's physical appearance and functionality may vary immensely from team to team. Indeed, the only stated limit on form is that the mass of its components together must be no greater than five pounds."
I'm making an Android app... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
It's NEVER lupus!
Re: (Score:2)
It was Lupus. Once. It was touched off with "I finally have a case of lupus".
That's why "It could be lupus" never comes up anymore.
Climate Change... (Score:3)
The word "tricorder" is a portmanteau of "tri-" and "recorder", referring to the device's three default scanning functions: GEO (geological), MET (meteorological), and BIO (biological).
Not sure what the Geological setting might say.
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm...
"The Earth has lupus?"
Re: (Score:1)
i'm going to win. (Score:5, Funny)
i'm building an ER in a zeppelin.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
They said mass, but used "pounds" as their unit of measurement, which is odd because imperial pounds only measure weight, not mass. So, er Zeppelin? Maybe....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Not so. There are two systems:
pounds (force) and slugs (mass)
poundals (force) and pounds (mass)
The first is the more common.
Re: (Score:1)
And a pound (mass) subjected to standard earth gravity creates a force equal to a pound (force in either system). So specifying a mass of 5 pounds is pretty straightforward.
It's really not any more confusing than the fact that metric countries frequently refer to forces in kilograms.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh the humanity!
Does it have to make the sound? (Score:4, Funny)
/or it could go ping; but it wouldn't be the same.
Re:Does it have to make the sound? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
How about "Bing" or is that still under (C) by Monty Python?
Re: (Score:2)
How about "Bing" or is that still under (C) by Monty Python?
No, Microsoft.
Re: (Score:1)
It's not like we're expecting some sort of Bing inquisition
Re: (Score:3)
No one expects the Bing inquisition!
It's not pretty when they blow. (Score:1)
Bonus if it can boil an egg at 30 paces, whether you want it to or not.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, if it makes a sound the Klingons will discover where you're hiding.
Re: (Score:1)
NASA, is that you? (Score:1)
A mass of no more than 5 pounds? Shouldn't that be either a weight of no more than 5 pounds or a mass of no more than ~2.25 Kg?
They need to mush home with the teacher.
Re:NASA, is that you? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The HypoSpray X-Prize can't be far away. (Score:1)
Borg implants can cause severe skin irritations. Perhaps you'd like an analgesic balm.....
Boy, do I have news for you... (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_injector [wikipedia.org]
sound too? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
RE: Events like this are really great, it really spurs innovation.
No, that's what patents were invented for. /Maniacal laughter
Re: (Score:3)
My entry is ready now. It's a hollowed out brick of lead with a flap on one side and a display screen painted on the other. The screen reads 'acute radiation poisoning'. The devices inner working are a trade secret.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Nonsense. The trick is to find standard technologies that can read and predict diseases.
(1) Laser or infrared thermometer. Check.
(2) Some form of paper chromatography tests. Get 'em from your hardware store. Check.
(3) Various voltage electrode readings. Have your doctor give you an EKG in the standard physical, and take home with you the electrodes. Check.
(4) A videocamera, an optical fine-focus camera, and a lense
Re: (Score:1)
(7) Lots and lots of programming. Ideally the tricorder should talk to the person, and listen to their answers, including such things as, "what seems to be the problem?" to get symptoms that it can look up.
Wouldn't "Please state the nature of the medical emergency" be more apropos?
Re: (Score:2)
Nonsense. The trick is to find standard technologies that can read and predict diseases.
(1) Laser or infrared thermometer. .
(2) Some form of paper chromatography tests. Get 'em from your pharmacy
(3) Various voltage electrode readings. Have your doctor give you an EKG in the standard physical, and take home with you the electrodes. Check.
(4) A videocamera, an optical fine-focus camera, and a lenseless PenCam camera wi
Will this do? (Score:1)
About time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
It has been. The x prizes are about encouraging startups and outsiders to the fields in question to become involved and so both bring fresh eyes to the problem and provide an influx of tallent in to a specific sub-sector
Re: (Score:2)
Allow me to introduce you to a little concept we in the real world call "economic incentive".
Re: (Score:2)
Not exactally a bribe (Score:2)
More like 'chance' funding.
Cellphones (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
They are aiming for under 5 lbs, that's an awful lot of weight to add to a 5 oz phone. A sixteen-fold increase might be a bit much to say one is adding medical instrumentation to a phone--it might be more accurate to say one is adding a phone to a medical instrument.
Re: (Score:2)
One step at a time. Virtual laser keyboards and laser projectors are cool but what we really want is to have them in our cellphones or other portable devices so that we don't have to whip out a peripheral. But being able to buy a separate one satisfies the early adopters now and paves the way for the tech to become more ubiquitous and cheaper and hopefully eventually smaller as well.
*medical* (Score:5, Informative)
*medical* tricoder they mean.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Complete waste of effort.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Asking people what's wrong with them isn't exactly an unbiased way of finding out what's really wrong with them. Their knowledge is full of errors (as it's reliant upon their memory, which is severely flawed), and they may not even feel things that are wrong with them. We need a way of doing a star trek-style scan of them to find out what's really wrong with them, instead of wasting time with their hypochondriacal problems.
As for taking someone's weight, you really think that asking people what they weigh is an accurate way of getting that information? I guess surgical centers should just take out their high-precision scales (used to get the patient weight right before surgery so the anesthesiologist can calculate the correct dosage so they don't kill the patient), and just ask the people what they weigh instead!! If a patient's home scale is off by 10%, or they don't want to admit to themselves that they're really 200 pounds and instead say they're 160, that'll be OK, right?
Even family medical history isn't very good data. A patient may be adopted, or a patient may not realize that the person who he believes is his father actually isn't (studies have shown that something like 10-15% of people were fathered by someone else; i.e., the mother had an affair and never told anyone). So the patient might be worried because all his relatives on his "father's" side have some condition and thinks he'll have it too, but he's actually not biologically related.
With semiconductor-based DNA scanning right over the horizon, yes, we should be working to build an MRI, centrifuge, and DNA lab into a five-pound box, and not waste time trying to make an accurate diagnosis with someone saying "my leg hurts!".
Re: (Score:2)
Use your imagination (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Will your tricorder be able to tell that they use drugs or really are an alcoholic? Image the nose and eyes. Perform a time-based FFT on the fingers as they sit there. Take a look at the IR frequency. Take an FFT on the voice.
I don't think it requires magic. I think a lot of the stuff *is* solvable with image analysis, and has already been developed by defense electronics companies. Take a look at the techs on display at embedded computing and RISC tech fairs.
Re: (Score:2)
House says people lie.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. Working in an MRI environment, some people have piercings in the usual places (genital area, nipple) and then discreetly ask one person accompanying them something about it but not mention it on their screening forms.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree. Working in an MRI environment, some people have piercings in the usual places (genital area, nipple) and then discreetly ask one person accompanying them something about it but not mention it on their screening forms.
I assume you can guess what is pierced from the pitch of their screaming?
MEDICAL tricorder (Score:1)
Technically this is a medical tricorder.
The tricorder that Spock uses to analyze planetary atmosphere and find several beings moving beyond that ridge is what I want.
But actually that's already been made: http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0996September/Sparky/tricorder.html
Already made this... (Score:5, Funny)
But, it diagnoses everyone who's ever even HEARD of a "tricorder" with A.D.D.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey! I've heard of a "tricorder" and I don't have ... oh look, a chicken.
Hundreds of million$ already on just glucose (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia's article on Noninvasive glucose monitor [wikipedia.org]:
And that's just one parameter. A useful tricorder would cost billions of dollars to make, not just $10 million.
Re: (Score:2)
A useful tricorder would cost billions of dollars to make, not just $10 million.
Agreed. Think of the number of tests it would need to do non-invasively; I believe one of the functions of the tricorder on the show seemed pretty much the same as an MRI scan. MRI scans only work becuase you surround the patient with a powerful magnetic field, and that's NOT coming with a hand-held device.
One point for the advent of the tricorder is in some ways I would argue the tricorder is actually out of date. If I also recall from the show, Star Fleet had an array of these devices for specialized fun
Re: (Score:1)
You can do an MRI with the Earth's magnetic field, it's just the SNR goes to pot and you get crappier scans. There are people working on low magnetic field image capture machines using NMR technology. Look at this: http://www.news-medical.net/news/2008/07/08/39842.aspx
You can also have small coil MRI units: http://medgadget.com/2005/05/mayo_clinic_bc1.html
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In production they dropped the Nuclear because people are scared of nuclear stuff and felt people wouldn't use the machine if they thought it produced radiation. From reading, I am understanding it has more to do with nuclei, and not radiation, so that was probably a wire choice.
Re: (Score:2)
This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been closed.
They go on to say "Sorry about that" but I'm not convinced they are. Anyway, you might want to update you sig.
Re: (Score:1)
True, but the PR windfall is much more valuable than the prize money. The publicity stirred up by claiming the prize would mean lots of exposure (and thus - more importantly in an emerging market - mindshare) through news programs, magazine articles, Google search results, etc. Also, I'd wager that if you can point to your X Prize during a sales pitch to hospitals, the US Military, or FEMA your claims suddenly get a lot more credibility so you're more likely to recoup those R&D costs through big contrac
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
You mean like how modern tablets like the iPad aren't allowed to look like the tablets used in Star Trek?
Oh, wait...
we had some in highschool (Score:2)
http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0996September/Sparky/tricorder.html [stim.com] I think that was the one we had. Really dorky one of a kind science class where we measured emf, geopositioned things (before public access to GPS), etc. Thing did temperature, emf, voltmeter stuff if you had the attachments I think, had a colour spectrum analyzer (so you could hold it up to something and it would tell you the rgb values).
sensors on a micro-USB device (Score:2)
I want to see the sensor pack on a thumb-drive-sized micro-USB device that can plug into any smartphone... um, sorry, *many* smartphones... Then tell CBS to stop screwing with Kenneth Lakin and turn him loose on it.
Ooooh oooh oooh, make the sensor pack a Bluetooth device that looks vaguely like a chrome cigarette lighter!
Re: (Score:2)
I can't realistically take credit. What made me think of it was Lakin's excellent Tricorder app for Android (previously PalmOS) [1] which actually did useful things; only hampered by the device's lack of sensors.
[1] Shut down by CBS for copyright infringement or somesuch. As I understand the story, Roddenberry explicitly granted permission to use the concept, later rescinded by the network.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an Android app as well...
https://market.android.com/details?id=biz.lakin.android.apps.tricorder [android.com]
Re: (Score:2)
It is a great app, I am glad that the Android (Data?) market didn't uninstall it from my phone when that happened.
I don't quite get the Cell phone to communicator comparisons though, a cell phone requires an enormous infrastructure to work, the communicators just worked. The best comparison I would make would be sat phones, with the Enterprise being the sat, but the communicators even worked unit to unit when they were unable to get a signal to the Enterprise.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to be too geeky, but I'd imagine the Enterprise routinely releasing several satellites when it moved into orbit to provide a communications and sensor infrastructure. But you're right, the communicators were intended to be used in the wild, so they would have to have the capability to communicate unit-to-unit also.
Re: (Score:2)
voice-controlled DCS scrambling for preprogrammed connections? With a link to a respository/directory of remote DCS codes?
We got the technology for that ~NOW~. Problem is it's in a few separate devices: personal radio transceivers (DCS/CTCSS scrambling/filtering), cellphones (network terminals and (for several years now) voice dialing), 192.com (directory services)... it doesn't need a cloud of satellites (that would end up creating a hazard around the planet), all it needs is a data connection to update th
Re: (Score:2)
I think we're getting wrapped up in orders of magnitude here. A cloud of satellites is definitely not necessary, just a few in geo or pole-to-pole orbits, and as Adams so famously said, "space is big", even the space immediately around a planet, compared to the size of a communications satellite. No reasonable danger of a hazard, especially on a frontier planet, unless we're talking decades of dumping junk into orbits that don't decay in a reasonable amount of time. One could even imagine recalling satel
CBS... (Score:2)
So... won't CBS sue the hell out of the winner?
i think... (Score:2)
there may be one company already making a fuzz about their pocket sized medical sensor.
Ah yes, found the article: http://singularityhub.com/2011/12/24/scanadu-raises-2m-for-medical-tricorder-video/ [singularityhub.com]
What are the 15 diseases? (Score:2)
I don't see it spelled out anywhere.
I have the solution. (Score:2)
Netbook: 2lb. Check.
It has a camera. It has a microphone. It has two other input devices (keyboard, touchpad), sometimes three (fingerprint reader). For external sensors, you have one or two USB ports. Pop in a rat tail for a finger pulse oximeter. Kick up the internet connection for the NHS Home Diagnostics page (right here [nhsdirect.nhs.uk]).
I think that surpasses the requirements somewhat.
Epic win.
Where's my prize?
Trekking along... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.greenleaf.android.translator.enes.a&hl=en [android.com]
It has been done.