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"  In the original Star Trek (and the many iterations of the franchise to follow), Dr. McCoy or any other physician of the Federation could wave a handheld instrument over his patients and glean an instantaneous readout of vital signs, illnesses, and other information about their physical conditions. &amp;quot;Healthcare today certainly falls far short of the vision portrayed in Star Trek,&amp;quot; Paul Jacobs, the head of Qualcomm, says. But by partnering with the X Prize Foundation, his firm hopes to drive medical technology in that direction.  The two groups announced this month that they are joining forces to launch the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, a $10 million competition to build a handheld, mobile device able to quickly diagnose a range of health problems and measure real-time information such as respiratory rate and blood pressure. &amp;quot;There is a dire need to improve access to healthcare globally and provide consumers with an opportunity to be active participants in their own health,&amp;quot; X Prize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis says. But how do scientists even approach creating a technology as advanced as Star Trek&amp;#039;s tricorder? Some researchers are already under way on small pieces of the ultimate end product. Austin, Texas\u2013based Monebo Technologies is one such group\u2014it makes software to measure and analyze information about the heart. CEO Dale Misczynski says his company&amp;#039;s software can perform tasks such as recognizing when a patient&amp;#039;s heart rate becomes irregular, and alert the patient and doctor about the arrhythmia. The software can also work with a variety of heart rate monitors\u2014as long as it gets the necessary information, there&amp;#039;s no reason it couldn&amp;#039;t be outfitted to work with just about any type of sensor, including a wireless one in a futuristic tricorder. Misczynski looks forward to collaborating with others. &amp;quot;I think we&amp;#039;ve got the cardiology portion covered,&amp;quot; he tells PM.  While there&amp;#039;s no rule about how much contact the tricorder can have with the body, the general trend is toward the least possible contact (after all, the Star Trek tricorder requires zero physical contact). That makes it difficult to actually analyze blood content, for example. But several companies are developing solutions. One of them, Sano Intelligence, is designing a needleless patch that uses electrochemical sensors to measure levels of various chemicals in the blood, like those quantified by a basic metabolic panel (the most basic blood test, which measures electrolytes and other substances). Sano co-founder Raj Gokal says the company is developing a prototype and may enter the competition. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re liberating the vast wealth of data in the bloodstream,&amp;quot; he says.  Other clever technologies already out there could be incorporated into one or a variety of tricorder-like devices. Phillips Co., for example, designed an iPad app that can use the tablet&amp;#039;s camera to measure heart rate by measuring the amount of light reflected by the blood just beneath the skin, which changes every time the heart beats. Ming-Zher Poh, founder and CEO of Cardiio, is developing similar software that can measure respiration rate and heart rate variability, a key indicator of stress placed on the heart. A beta version will launch next month, and Poh said he&amp;#039;s considering entering the X Prize competition.  Many of these technologies are still far from being realized. But Rachel Kalmar, co-founder of SenStore, a company that plans to enter the competition, says the fact that these systems are in such early stages is the beauty of a tricorder X Prize: Besides driving new technologies, the competition will also propel creative ways of making new measurements with existing technology. An MRI machine will be hard to shrink, for instance. But Kalmar, a neuroscience Ph.D., says she can imagine something as simple and ubiquitous as a camera making other measurements to serve as a proxy for a brain scan. For example, gauging reaction time or eye movement could indirectly gauge brain activity or help to diagnose illness. Indeed, Misczynski says, many if not most of the technologies and sensors that you might envision being in a tricorder already exist, but nobody has really thought about combining them before, which is why he&amp;#039;s excited about the contest. &amp;quot;Medicine is a bunch of silos,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The cardiologist wouldn&amp;#039;t even think of talking to a pulmonologist.&amp;quot;  Monebo and other specialized groups will probably try to align themselves into teams that seek to integrate all these disparate technologies into a final product. One such team is led by Scanadu, a company that formed in January 2011, before the X Prize was announced, with the specific goal of creating a tricorder. Co-founder Misha Chellam says the company has already raised millions to make the device, but the potential prize money is an extra incentive. SenStore also seeks to be a team builder, but is taking a slightly different approach: crowd-sourcing solutions to individual challenges. For example, co-founders Kalmar and Antony Evans competed in a San Francisco\u2013area Startup Weekend, an intense 54-hour workshop to develop marketable technologies, and tasked engineers with turning SenStore&amp;#039;s hardware, made up of accelerometers mounted in a shirt, into a useful product. The end result was a program called Live Home Free, in which the device detects sudden changes in movement or posture that would indicate a fall and then alerts 911. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the Jetsons version of &amp;#039;Help, I&amp;#039;ve fallen and I can&amp;#039;t get up,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Raymond McCauley, a geneticist familiar with SenStore&amp;#039;s work.  Miniaturizing all these sensors and uniting them into an unobtrusive device is a huge challenge. The $10 million prize, to be awarded in early 2016, will go to the team that develops a device that most accurately diagnoses a set of 15 diseases across 30 patients in three days, and provides the data in a consumer-friendly way.  There are also a variety of smaller prizes for specific diagnostic feats yet to be determined. Eileen Bartholomew, head of prize development for the X Prize Foundation, says the competition is partly designed to spawn a variety of tricorder-like technologies. &amp;quot;What might be a &amp;#039;winning solution&amp;#039; may not be a single device, but a series of partnerships,&amp;quot; she explains.  So, the end result of this X-Prize may not be Dr. McCoy&amp;#039;s medical tricorder. But Bartholomew says the tie-in with Star Trek makes more sense than you might think. &amp;quot;Any futuristic story is inspirational\u2014creating stories and technology breakthroughs can be surprisingly similar. Its power and draw is something that people can understand,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Ultimately, we&amp;#039;ll change what people think is possible.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a7472/the-race-to-build-a-real-star-trek-tricorder-6649721/>