Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry would be proud, because the crowd-funded Scanadu Scout has surpassed its goal, by almost $400,000 on Indiegogo, and will become the first non-fiction medical tricorder to ever hit the market.
I say “non-fiction” because Star Trek invented the idea of the tricorder in the fictional TV show’s device that allows a medical scan to check vitals within a minute of holding it to the body. I can just see Bones now as he grasps the tool and fights with a bruised and scraped up Captain Kirk to let him hold the medical reader up to his forehead for an uninterrupted minute.
The small, Roku-shaped Scout tricorder measures temperature, electrocardiogram rates, heart rate and variability, oximetry, clock pulse wave transit time akin to blood pressure, urine analysis, and a unique setting that Scanadu labels stress.
Apparently the urine analysis takes a little longer than a minute and a little more effort than holding the Scout up to your forehead, but this is only the prototype, folks! Now that the Scanadu is over a half million dollars invested and that with twenty-two days still left on the Indigogo campaign, there will be better versions coming, I’m sure.
The Trekkies over at NASA helped to influence Scanadu. They based their design for the Scout on the 32-bit RTOS Micrium platform, which was used for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) engine on the Curiosity Rover.
This is the voyage of the Star Trek Enterprise . . . its mission . . . to boldly scan what humankind has never scanned before. Those wearing red shirts need not apply for one of these (their vitals will not be important for long).
