Apart from cooking up a variety of his favourite “I’m a doctor not a…” catchphrase and repeating over and over again that, “He’s dead Jim”, Dr McCoy didn’t have that much to do.
Whenever someone on Star Trek fell ill or got injured, Dr McCoy would just wave his tricorder around and get an instant readout of the patient’s physical condition.
Of course, it’s all science fiction life on board the USS Enterprise – till now, because technology giant Qualcomm and the X Prize Foundation – which in the past has given multimillion-dollar awards for high mileage cars and lunar landers – have launched the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize.
This competition, which carries a $10m (€7.5m) prize, is to build a handheld, mobile device that is able to quickly diagnose a range of health problems and measure real-time information such as a patient’s blood pressure and respiratory rate. A number of researchers are already working on potential entries. Texas-based firm Monebo Technologies has written software that measures and analyses information about the heart while start-up Sano Intelligence is designing a needleless patch that uses sensors to measure levels of chemicals in the blood.
Another start-up, Cardiio, is developing software that measures respiration rate and heart rate variability. The CEO of Cardiio says they are considering entering the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition.
For the purpose of the competition, various start-ups and specialised companies will probably work in teams so as to increase their chances of developing a tricorder.
The $10m prize will be awarded in early 2016 to the team that will manage to develop a device that can accurately diagnose and provide data on 15 diseases across 30 patients and three days.