Thursday, January 9, 2014

Medicine Jim, but not as we know it: Star Trek-style tricorder that scans for signs of disease!

The London Daily Mail ^ | January 8, 2014 | Victoria Woollaston 

Imagine a world where a handheld gadget scans your body and diagnoses illnesses in seconds - reducing hospital visits and potentially saving your life.
It may sound like the work of science fiction but engineers in California have taken their lead from the Star Trek franchise and developed a real-life version of the show’s medical tricorder.
The Scanadu Scout can read a person’s temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and more, simply being held against their forehead.
It was developed by Scanadu’s CEO Walter De Brouwer, 56, at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California.
A prototype of the Scout was first unveiled in 2012 and the latest model is on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas.
The portable electronic device contains a variety of different sensors, plus a microphone on the top of the gadget, that can read five vital signs.
These include body temperature, heart rate, oximetry (blood oxygen levels), ECG waves, heart rate variability and pulse wave transit time (PWTT) - the time it takes for a heartbeat to reach somewhere else in a person’s body. PWTT is related to blood pressure.
Its makers claim the device is 99 per cent accurate in less than 10 seconds....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...

T-Shirt