Gates Foundation wants real 'Star Trek' tricorder

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Well, this would be a great achievement.

Another great acheivement would be if the applets that we post and write in would br retriveable when you get knocked offline or an error spews your work into some unknown void, or as just happened to me, I rested my hand on keyboard and the page I was almost complete in typing - along with the rest of my post, went bye bye....

So, I'll withhold the story I almost posted for lack of time and just end by stating that the researchers definitely has the right financiers for the project.

reply to post by imd12c4funn


Well considering all the sensors already inside modern communication devices such as iphone an similar (gyroscope, magnetometer, gps, sound-meter/microphone, light-sensor, camera etc) and the softare available through apps, making it possible to use them as decibel counters, compasses, bubble-level etc, we are already halfway there.

All that is needed are a few more sensors such as for radioactivity, x-ray emitter, ir-thermometer, etc (tech already exists) and the appropriate software to get a full-blown tricorder, i do not see this a problem.

Interesting article however.

We are getting pretty close to having the technology.... perhaps not in a hand-held device, but certainly as a combined unit that can perform operations like MRI, multi-spectral imaging (both active and passive), while performing back-scatter analysis on all of them... using computers to stitch together all of that information would yield a large amount of meta-data... an instance where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The main issues of concern would be radiation exposure limits... which are kept very low with extreme fervor from activist groups. But, really, you wouldn't need more than is usually used, anyway - you would simply be doing back-scatter analysis on everything while using other illumination methods (such as laser light that will help give data on the dermal layers).

It's just a matter of boxing it all up into one functional unit and doing the ground-work to write the code that interprets the received data in an accurate manner.

reply to post by imd12c4funn

The nice thing about sci-fi is it's flexible. The fictional tricorder could do environmental scans as well as medical scans plus who knows what else.

There's already a real environmental tricorder:

www.stim.com...

The Link you posted is talking about a medical version, I guess they don't have that one quite yet, but I'm sure they can make one.

Sorry you lost your post, I hate it when that happens.

Remember, before dismissing the concept of a all-in-one handheld device as too unrealistic.......how many times in the past has that same thing been said...."If man was supposed to fly...."....Actually think we have one already, wasn't there a death bed confession from a ceo of Lockheed Martin Ben Rich....he refers to a little box that would not only analyze the human body of ailment, but would fix it.......He was ready to roll it out in factories.....But now some of you would say, 'why would anyone keep that from us'.......uhm, it is in the best interest of the companies for things to have a shelf life....ie, for example, cars, it is in Ford's best interest to have a mustang break down beyond repair after say five years....they can sell a new one.....If the car lasted 50 years, the companies would go out of business......and that is true with any produced product.....Now, to the human body, if we are sick, it fuels the system....We go to the doctor, fees, we get tests, fees, they prescribe drugs, fees.....we stay ON those drugs, massive fees......if there was a simple box to do all this, CHEAP.....right that is what they want.

reply to post by pointr97

No one has dismissed it outright YET.But.....the idea of a handheld non contact device (Mc.Coy had to use that little cylindrical swirly thing along with his tricorder for medical diagnosis) for things like pulse/heartbeat and blood pressure are outside the limits of medical physics and not just current medical knowledge.I'm no doctor,but I doubt if you could get an accurate diagnosis that would be any more accurate than a phone call saying "Doctor I feel ill" without having some sort of sensor physically attached to the body?

Edit.....Actually thinking about it now implanting medical transponder chips into people wouldn't be al that hard would it?

Chris.

reply to post by Imagewerx


Sorry Chris,
Maybe I miss read your comment, but you started by saying no one is dismissing it outright yet, but then you go to dismiss it outright.....Which was exactly my point, that there have been so many times in human history that people have said 'can't be done' or 'isnt that way'......and then to be proven wrong, the earth is in fact round, man can fly......we can harness lightening (or electricity rather). You offer no real reason why an handheld device couldn't read vitals, or diagnose a human condition.....do we not have a device to passively read sugar levels for diabetes.....thirty years ago, telephones had to be connected to a wall....now......now...seriously, if you were to hand a droid to someone of the 70s ( and yes i am one), i would be blown away and call you a sorcerer......what will we have ten years from now from our own tech, regardless of what the powers at be have already gained from external sources......now, as i was saying, try not to dismiss it outright.

reply to post by Imagewerx


LOL...not to mention that 30 years ago, if You did call the doctor....all they could hear is your voice......So now....if you call a doctor, they could see your face too......boy, just a thought, what will they see 5, 10, 25 years from now...

Originally posted by pointr97
reply to post by Imagewerx

 

Sorry Chris,
Maybe I miss read your comment, but you started by saying no one is dismissing it outright yet, but then you go to dismiss it outright.....Which was exactly my point, that there have been so many times in human history that people have said 'can't be done' or 'isnt that way'......and then to be proven wrong, the earth is in fact round, man can fly....

Yes that's a human flaw, isn't it. We're limited by our present ignorance. But that doesn't necessarily mean "anything is possible", it just means we don't know for sure.

I think this is a mixed bag. Measuring temperature, pulse rate, breathing might be possible with non-contact.

But I don't see how you can get both blood pressure readings without contact. This could be another "man can't fly" argument, and I admit that but I'm just not seeing it. I think you'd have to have contact to measure both blood pressure readings.

Then again why would that be such a big deal? It's too much trouble to put a cuff around someone's arm?

Or if the other readings are helpful enough, maybe you don't even need to know both blood pressure readings?

reply to post by pointr97

I still haven't dismissed it outright.I can't even feel my own heartbeat normally unless I press hard on the inside of my wrist or my neck,for a machine or ECG to pick up the VERY VERY small electrical impulses that fire the heart from the surface off the skin it would have to be VERY VERY sensitive.To pick it up remotely without contact it would have to be VERY VERY VERY VERY sensitive and would find it extremely difficult to discriminate the signals it's looking for from all the other electrical junk signals that infest all populated parts of the planet.It might just be possible in the middle of the desert,but certainly not anywhere there's any sort of electrical interference where this sort of thing would be used the most.

We can measure external body temperature remotely which can give us a good general indication of a persons medical status and maybe even how dilated the persons pupils are.A remote device could process this information and give nothing more accurate than a general health status score say from 1 to 10,1 being good and make sure to renew gym membership 10 being call the next of kin.

The ability to do accurate and quick triage can be the difference between life and death.Take a bad train crash as an example where there is only one qualified doctor on the scene and lots of medics and other non medically trained rescue workers.If the amount of time it takes the doctor to attend ALL the injured and assess who is in need of the most urgent treatment is too long,people who could otherwise have been saved will die.If one of the medics/police etc present at the scene before the arrival of the doctor could do all the triage simply by walking round and pointing a handheld medical scanner at anyone that's injured,when the qualified doctors arrived their skills could be put to use straight away on those that need it the most and not wasted on people that need nothing more than a couple of Aspirin.Of course the medics/ambulance crew will be better equipped to make vague medical judgements based on their limited training than say a fireman would,but would they be able to pick up on things such as internal bleeding? The point I'm trying to make is yes I'd love to see this technology available to all the emergency services that would even let the doctor know EXACTLY what to expect before he even arrived at the scene. I'm rather accident prone so have spent quite some time plugged in to various hospital hardware and know that the second I pull a sensor off my skin,the machine loses the signal and assumes I'm dead by making THAT noise.

100 or so years ago a couple of bicycle makers from Ohio proved to a world full of cynics that a heavier than air machine could make sustained flight a possibility,and even then until they had empirical evidence they still didn't believe it had happened.Today we know enough about physics and the basic way the universe works that we can see a short distance into the future and can say with SOME degree of certainty what technology will and won't be able to do for us in 5 years time,10 years time and so on......

My idea above of implanted medical transponders can't be that far fetched can it? Everyone at birth gets one,then using NFC (Near Field Communication) technology now being implemented we could even use our smartphones to monitor our own health and then send the results directly to a doctor if needed?

Chris.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by pointr97
reply to post by Imagewerx

 

Sorry Chris,
Maybe I miss read your comment, but you started by saying no one is dismissing it outright yet, but then you go to dismiss it outright.....Which was exactly my point, that there have been so many times in human history that people have said 'can't be done' or 'isnt that way'......and then to be proven wrong, the earth is in fact round, man can fly....

Yes that's a human flaw, isn't it. We're limited by our present ignorance. But that doesn't necessarily mean "anything is possible", it just means we don't know for sure.

I think this is a mixed bag. Measuring temperature, pulse rate, breathing might be possible with non-contact.

But I don't see how you can get both blood pressure readings without contact. This could be another "man can't fly" argument, and I admit that but I'm just not seeing it. I think you'd have to have contact to measure both blood pressure readings.

Then again why would that be such a big deal? It's too much trouble to put a cuff around someone's arm?

Or if the other readings are helpful enough, maybe you don't even need to know both blood pressure readings?

Your post brings a recollection to me regarding non-contact devices. I find it interesting that now, with GPS and services such as OnStar, you can have a portable GPS device to take with you in any vehicle and it can, in real time, show where you are and the exact speed you are travelling at, including the posted speed limit of the road you are driving on at the specific location within the road.

I would say a future with medical diagnosis )and possibly repair, I.e. a replicator feature that can even replicate the elements needed to produce the item) cold be as compact a device as hand held. Possibly very light wheight as well. Could you imagine producing something as big as an elephant from a hand held device?

Another capability that would be great ti include in such a device would be a mass spectrometer that could decipher the makeup of any material thing, without the heat....

Possibly even get white powder gold without the 6K+ temeratures for 70 seconds.

Then you might be able to easily carry that elephant you just replicated.

WeDo have a scanner Tricorder.
A XRF scanner.
Hand held scanner.
oh! by the way. it gives out radiation!!!