Star Trek tricorder: This may be the best we can do – for now

They don’t diagnose diseases with a few waves of the hand, the way that Dr. Leonard McCoy would with his tricorder on Star Trek. But 2 mobile platforms – algorithms and sensors paired with smart devices – nearly met the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize’s audacious benchmarks for diagnosing 13 disease states.In the process, a Philadelphia area team started by siblings and a Taiwan-based team sponsored by HTC Corp. each took home millions of dollars as Tricorder XPrize winners after an April 12 awards ceremony.

The first-place Final Frontier Medical Devices team and second-place Dynamical Biomarkers Group team won out of a group of 7 finalists, pared down out of an original 300 pre-entry teams from 38 countries.

Besides being able to diagnose a host of diseases in a single platform, the devices involved in each mobile platform weighed less than a combined 5 pounds and were easy enough for consumers to use at home, according to the XPrize organizers. They come the closest when it came to the prize’s goal of creating devices to empower consumers in the management of their own health.

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