"I'm a doctor, not an engineer!"
This was a line spoken by Dr. Leonard McCoy in the original 1960s "Star Trek" series. During the show's run on the air, there would be many variations of that line. It became a staple of the sci-fi series and loved by its fans.
McCoy was also known for using a nifty little device called a tricorder. This handheld system could be waved over a patient's body to quickly and painlessly diagnose a range of medical conditions – a device that would surely revolutionize today's medical industry.
The Qualcomm Foundation – a non-profit offshoot of the chip manufacturer of the same name – is sponsoring a contest that brings the engineer and the physician one step closer to each other, and brings the healthcare industry closer to having an actual tricorder.
The contest runs through the summer of 2015 and will challenge teams to build a handheld machine with highly advanced sensors that can diagnose 15 medical conditions and monitor 5 human vital signs. A partner program, co-sponsored by mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, asks participants to build similar sensors that could perhaps one day be used in tricorder devices, or even smartphones.
Mark Winters, the senior director of the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE and Nokia Sensing X Challenge, spoke with GigaOM at their Mobilize 2012 show in San Francisco last week.
Winters told GigaOM that "we have more and more powerful handheld platforms and embedded systems that can handle complex analytical tasks like never before. And finally, there has been a remarkable revolution in powerful sensor technologies that have come to market or that are being developed by universities all around the world that can capture levels of information about human physiology that we've never seen before."
The pairing of such advanced sensors with state-of-the-art thermal management technologies could one day very soon take the tricorder out of "Star Trek" lore and put it in the hands of physicians – and even consumers with medical sensor-equipped smartphones.