Winner Of A Global Competition: Meet DxtER, the real-life Star Trek Tricorder

Science fiction has given inventors a lot of inspiration, for instance, who wouldn’t like to have the sonic screwdriver of Dr. Who or the Tricorder from Star Trek? Well, while there hasn’t been any news on the sonic screwdriver, there is news about the all-purpose medical device known as the Tricorder.

Thanks To Worldwide Competition Star Trek Tricorder Officially Exists

The medical world would be changed forever with the Tricorder as it would be able to diagnose a patient instantly. The X-Price Foundation wanted the Tricorder so badly that they started a worldwide competition to find out if anyone out there could invent one.

DxtER Is The Real-Life Tricorder

One team has come out victorious; a family team with the name of Final Frontier Medical Devices from Pennsylvania in the USA. The non-profit foundation managed to get hold of the $2.5 million prize fund, while the Dynamical Biomarkers Group from Taiwan came in second place and took home $1million.

The whole objective of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition was to come up with a handheld device that was non-invasive and which was lightweight, which was able to identify 13 different health conditions, 12 of which were diseases and the absence of disease, within 90 minutes to 24 hours and without additional help from any medical professionals. Vital health metrics that were required to be constantly monitored included heartbeat and respiratory functions. It was said that the winning device from the team was, in fact, more advanced that the fictional version from Star Trek.

The competition started in 2012 and out of the 312 teams that started out, it was cut down to just ten teams. The two finalists had been revealed in December last year, and six were honored at the Los Angeles prizegiving ceremony.

Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency physician, and brother George Harris, a network engineer headed the winning team. They designed DxtER, a device that had artificial intelligence, which they funded along with two other members of the family.

They decided that one device wasn’t sufficient to be able to diagnose, accurately and quickly, various conditions in the patient and found they needed to link the device to a wealth of medical data.

DxtER Uses Custom Built AI To Diagnose 34 Conditions

The team used custom-built artificial intelligence on DxtER that makes use of sensors that are non-evasive, to give them a baseline health report on the patient, while at the same time comparing and being able to contrast the states, thanks to an encyclopedia of the most cutting edge medical information from clinical databases. The artificial intelligence is said to be so complex that it can diagnose accurately 13 of the medical conditions required a long time before the 24 hour time frame expired. At the moment the device can diagnose a total of 34 conditions.

While the Tricorder won the competition, it doesn’t end there as the team has been given funding along with experts to help to advance the device and take it beyond the prototype phase. $3.8 million has been committed by the Qualcomm Foundation along with a request for a proposal for $2.5 million grant to the University of California, so they too can get involved.

It was also said that the Roddenberry Foundation is to give $1.6 million for the adaptation of the Tricorder so that it may be used in hospitals and developing communities around the world. One of the first facilities to get it and test it in real life scenarios will be a facility in Mozambique.

What does happen to be very cool is that in the original Star Trek TV series, the Tricorder was first seen during the 2230s. This means that the real thing has been invented 210 years ahead of that schedule.