Toronto team hopeful their ‘tricorder’ could win XPrize

The future has arrived.

A Canadian company, along with 20 other teams from around the world, is competing to win a $10 million XPrize by attempting to recreate Dr. Leonard McCoy’s tricorder from the famous hit series 'Star Trek', CBC reports.

The ‘tricorder’, which was featured on the show nearly 50 years ago, is a device that could diagnose a patient’s ailments as well as read their vital signs with the simple swipe of a button.

Attempting to go where no medical team has gone before, the Cloud DX team from a Toronto-based medical device company called Biosign is attempting to design a “home-based lab” component. It will be able to analyze blood, urine and saliva. The prototype they are submitting for the contest prize is based on Pulsewave, an existing product that measures blood pressure, heart rate and pulse rhythm irregularities. The results appear on a small screen via reading from a USB-powered wrist monitor.

“For the XPrize, however, really the goal is to have something that’s much more mobile, much more powerful,” said chief medical officer Dr. Sonny Kohli, who works in critical care at the Oakville-Trafalgar Hospital, outside of Toronto.

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The XPrize competition, which is sponsored by the Qualcomm Foundation, seeks to find a team that can create a lightweight, portable device that would allow people to diagnose a set of 15 medical disorders as well as check vital signs. I’m sure we can all agree on how much we hate those gruesome doctor’s office wait times, so just imagine if you could simply use your trusty ‘tricorder’ to assess yourself from home!

The tricorder would be able to check for such things as Type 2 diabetes, a urinary tract infection, high cholesterol, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, oxygen saturation and even HIV among other ailments.

"Incorporating these technologies into a hand-held device will ultimately be opening up the opportunity for these devices to be sold directly to consumers," said Grant Campany, a senior director with the XPrize foundation.

In August, the XPrize competition will narrow down the list to ten finalists who will then submit prototypes to test on real-life patients.

"The winner will be the team whose technology most accurately diagnoses a set of diseases independent of a health-care professional or facility, and that provides the best consumer user experience with their device," says the foundation on its website.

The winner of the XPrize competition will be announced in September of 2015, pending the foundation's consideration to wait and instead announce the winner in January of 2016 when the genesis of ‘Star Trek’ will celebrate it’s 50^th anniversary.

The $10 million dollar prize money will be split among the top 3 finalists. $7 million to the winner, $2 million for the runner-up and $1 million for the third-place recipient.

Kholi stated that if the Canadian team were to win first place, the money would be directly used to commercially develop their innovative ‘Star Trek’ device. According to him, the ‘tricorder’ is one of the few technological devices from ‘Star Trek’ that has yet to be invented in the real world. Perhaps, now is the time.

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