Bones, What Does the Tricorder Say?

Star date 1312.4, and going where no man has gone before was soon to become as commonplace “beam me up” or Dr. McCoy’s medical body scan with a tricorder. It was a Star Trek fantasy of the future, but most of us believed that someday most of that futuristic technology would be real. The ability to hold a device in your hand and discover all the medical vitals and issues in seconds was a medical holy grail.

As time has passed, we’ve discovered magnetic resonance imaging and CAT and PET scans. Nuclear lung scans have joined with genetic mapping and analysis to provide new insights and more rapid diagnostics. Thermometers no longer have to take readings from inside the body, and other vitals that once required expensive trips to well-equipped diagnostic labs are now common in your local physician’s office. Still, that tricorder has been elusive, but with smart phones, wouldn’t it be great if someone would give us frail and mortal humans a small device that could take vital readings and send them to a competent doctor for immediate review? Save a trip to the emergency room, huh?

Well, folks have been trying to take the first steps to creating such a device, but think of the difficulties of a simple scan. Blood pressure is measured with an inflatable cuff that goes around your arm, and EKG gets all these suction cups stuck to your body, a stethoscope is placed next to your heart and lungs to get an accurate sound, and a thermometer needs to go to a warm spot (mouth, arm pit, ear, butt, etc.) to get a reading. But a mere mortal needs simple instructions to be able to make that device palatable. “Hold this device to your temple until you hear a beep,” is a complex as most of us can deal with.

Well, a little tech start-up (Scanadu) based out of the NASA-Ames Research Center has been working on this rather small device for a while now, with a target date of December 31, 2012 to deliver a prototype. Oh, that’s… er… now! What’s even more revolutionary, given the desire to make such a device ubiquitous, is holding the price down to a consumer-friendly $150, a number that would make Apple blush. Good news. They are on schedule.

“Scanadu’s team pulled it off; the device gets all the information from one point on your temple, and only needs to scan the body for 10 seconds to get a 99% accuracy rate….The Scanadu SCOUT is incredibly easy to use--just raise the handheld device (connected by Bluetooth to a smartphone) to your temple, and wait 10 seconds for it to scan your vital signs, including temperature, ECG, SPO2 [oxygen saturation in the bloodstream], heart rate, and breathing rate. ‘It lets the consumer explore all the diagnostic possibilities of an emergency room,’ explains co-founder Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian futurist and entrepreneur who first prototyped a backpack-sized tricorder-like device in the late 1990s…

“Perhaps even more important than the device itself is the way that users interact with it. A free smartphone app records all readings taken so you can see when something looks out of the ordinary. The app has a color rating system--if your breathing rate is out of control, for example, you’ll see red. Scanadu is also working on an ‘economical system’ that lets users send data to their doctors (many of whom may not know what to do with so much data, but that’s another story).” FastCompany.com, November 29^th.

But wait, there’s more! “In addition to the SCOUT, Scanadu is working on two other products: ScanaFlo and ScanaFlu. The ScanaFlo is a urine analysis system for pregnant women that checks for complications (preeclampsia, diabetes) throughout the pregnancy. The device can also check for urinary tract infections. It consists of 20 cartridges that can be dipped in urine; all data is sent back to the Scanadu app. The ScanaFlu is a saliva test that checks for--you guessed it--the flu (and other upper respiratory infections).” FastCompany.com. And other companies are developing apps for Scanadu’s systems.

I don’t know about you, but I wanna get me one of them thar devices real soon. It’s more than just cool. It might just save my or someone in my family’s life. Hey!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to know where America is still great, look at the cutting edge technology we create!