{"id":13015,"date":"2012-01-12T10:51:02","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T15:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13015"},"modified":"2012-02-03T15:10:41","modified_gmt":"2012-02-03T20:10:41","slug":"new-10m-x-prize-for-a-medical-tricorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/12\/new-10m-x-prize-for-a-medical-tricorder\/","title":{"rendered":"New $10m X Prize for a “medical tricorder”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get your Vulcan ears out for the next X Prize<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize has challenged researchers to build a tool capable of capturing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases”.<\/p>\n

It needs to be light enough for would-be Dr McCoys to carry — a maximum weight of 5lb (2.2kg).<\/p>\n

The prize was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

The award organisers hope the huge prize may inspire a present-day engineer to figure out the sci-fi gadget’s secret, and “make 23rd Century science fiction a 21st Century medical reality”.<\/p>\n

“I’m probably the first guy who’s here in Vegas who would be happy to lose $10m,” said X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis.<\/p>\n

While the tricorder is obviously the stuff of science fiction, other X Prizes have become science fact.<\/p>\n

In 2004, the Ansari X Prize for a privately funded reusable spacecraft was awarded to the team behind SpaceShipOne.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Update, 3 February<\/b>: I’d forgotten about ESR’s post<\/a> from a while back that — in many ways — we already have tricorders:<\/p>\n

\n

But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now. Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for \u201ctricorder\u201d in the Android market. For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a fictional<\/em> gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function. I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably real<\/em> tricorder in my hand.<\/p>\n

Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don\u2019t<\/em> have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.<\/p>\n

And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about ephemeralization). Which in turn points at the fundamental<\/em> reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets; because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that previously existed only as science fiction!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Get your Vulcan ears out for the next X Prize: The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize has challenged researchers to build a tool capable of capturing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases”. It needs to be light enough for would-be Dr McCoys to carry — a maximum weight of 5lb (2.2kg). The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,16,15],"tags":[174,85,223,776],"class_list":["post-13015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-science","category-technology","tag-innovation","tag-sf","tag-startrek","tag-xprize"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3nV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13015"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13381,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015\/revisions\/13381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}