The Race to Construct a Real-Life Version of the “Star Trek” Tricorder

A handful of nice fast prototyping costs pictures I located:

The Race to Build a True-Life Version of the “Star Trek” Tricorder

Image by genphyslab
The Race to Build a True-Life Version of the “Star Trek” Tricorder – Common PHYSICS LABORATORY (GPL)
By Evan Ackerman

Photo: XPRIZETech From “Star Trek” Dressed in a Starfleet uniform, Tatiana Rypinski holds a replica tricorder for the duration of a photo shoot for the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. She leads 1 of the finalist teams in the competitors.
Tatiana Rypinski is maybe two bites into her salad when she realizes it&#8217s time for her next meeting. She gets to her feet and heads to the Biomedical Engineering Style Studio, a hybrid of prototyping space, wet lab, and machine shop at the Johns Hopkins University&#8217s Homewood campus, in Baltimore. Rypinski and a handful of of her colleagues collect close to some worktables with energy outlets dangling from the ceiling. A tool cart is in 1 corner, a microscope in an additional. Two 3-D printers sit idle along a wall. The students have agreed to meet me right here to discuss their work on a project whose aim is not just inspired by science fiction—it actually comes straight out of “Star Trek.” They want to develop a healthcare tricorder.
In 1966, “Star Trek” introduced the tricorder as, in essence, a plot device. Like the transporter, which could “beam” people in between starships and planets without asking the audience to sit via lengthy landing sequences, the tricorder could quickly diagnose health-related conditions and recommend therapies, keeping the story moving. With a wave of this fictional device, a Starfleet crew member could get a complete medical evaluation without having having to be admitted to the ship&#8217s sick bay.
Right here in the genuine globe, though, if you have a nonemergency situation, you might wait days—weeks, in some places—to see a doctor. And if you require laboratory tests, receiving a diagnosis can take even longer. A lot of waiting is involved, and waiting is the final issue you want to do when you&#8217re sick. It&#8217s even worse in the building world, where a shortage of medical facilities and personnel means that seeing a medical doctor may possibly not be an option at all. What we require is a tricorder. A real one particular.
Rypinski is the leader of Aezon, a single of the teams participating in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. The competitors launched in 2012, when the XPrize Foundation and U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm challenged innovators from around the globe to create a transportable, customer-friendly device capable of diagnosing a comprehensive set of health-related situations. More than 300 teams registered, and after a series of critiques, the organizers selected 10 finalists, announced last August.
This month, the final phase of the competition starts. Each and every finalist group was expected to deliver 30 functioning prototypes, which will now undergo a battery of tests with actual patients. Prizes totaling US million will go to the winner and two runners-up, to be announced early subsequent year, when “Star Trek” will be celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Aezon is the youngest finalist team: All of its members are undergraduates at Hopkins. Some have by no means even observed the original “Star Trek” episodes. “My dad is a huge fan, although,” one particular student tells me. For her part, Rypinski is unfazed. “This is something we&#8217re undertaking because we enjoy it,” she says, “and I believe that sets us apart.”
The other finalists incorporate higher-profile startups like Scanadu, in Silicon Valley, and effectively-funded medical businesses like DNA Medicine Institute, in Cambridge, Mass., which has a partnership with NASA. 4 teams are primarily based in the United States, and the other six are from Canada, England, India, Northern Ireland, Slovenia, and Taiwan.
Their tricorders won&#8217t be all-effective transportable scanners like those in “Star Trek,” but they nevertheless must demonstrate some impressive capabilities. They&#8217ll have to diagnose 13 medical situations, including anemia, diabetes, hepatitis A, leukocytosis, pneumonia, stroke, tuberculosis, and urinary tract infections. In addition, teams choose 3 extra circumstances from a list that involves food-borne illness, melanoma, osteoporosis, whooping cough, shingles, mononucleosis, strep throat, and HIV. And their systems have to be in a position to monitor crucial indicators like temperature, blood stress and oxygen saturation, heart price, and respiratory rate—not only in genuine time but for periods of a number of days as nicely.
The objectives might seem impossibly tough, but XPrize believes they can be achieved, thanks to a host of relatively current technological advances. These contain sophisticated machine-finding out techniques applied to healthcare data, cost-efficient microfluidic and other lab-on-a-chip systems, and more quickly and more affordable laboratory tests such as rapid polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for DNA analysis. Just as crucial, there&#8217s the popularization of individual genomics solutions and fitness-tracking gear, exemplifying people&#8217s want to find out far more about their bodies and well being.
Simply because the enabling technologies already exist in some type nowadays, a lot of the challenge is about integrating them into a compelling system, says Grant Campany, senior director of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. A tricorder isn&#8217t intended to keep you out of your physician&#8217s office: It won&#8217t be able to treat any of the circumstances it can recognize. But it will be able to give you a fast and detailed picture of what might be the matter with you—which is a lot much better than googling your symptoms and sorting by way of dubious healthcare sites, as a lot of folks do today.
Campany says the diseases chosen for the challenge are frequently not diagnosed early sufficient and consequently lead to a considerable quantity of deaths and hospitalizations: “The aim right here is to try to identify items as soon as achievable so that men and women don&#8217t wait and get sicker.”
Tricorder XPrize: The Final Frontier
This month, the US million Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize enters its final phase. The 10 finalists listed below are expected to provide a set of functioning prototypes to be tested with actual sufferers. The winner will be announced early next year.

Aezon (Rockville, Md.)
Students from Johns Hopkins University are constructing a 3-component program that consists of a smartphone app, a vitals monitoring device worn around the neck, and a lab unit to analyze samples of blood, urine, and saliva.

Cloud DX (Kitchener, Ont., Canada)
The private company&#8217s dozen or so engineers and scientists are establishing Vitaliti, a vitals monitor worn about the neck. The team&#8217s tricorder will also contain an earpiece and lab analysis unit with smartphone integration.

Danvantri (Chennai, India)
Backed by technologies firm American Megatrends India, Danvantri (named for the Hindu god of medicine) is augmenting its commercially obtainable B.OL.T. electronic blood pressure cuff with a suite of modular sensors for its tricorder.

DMI (Cambridge, Mass.)
DMI plans to integrate its sophisticated diagnostic system (which won XPrize&#8217s Nokia Sensing XChallenge in 2014 and will undergo trials on the International Space Station) with a wearable vitals patch.

Dynamical Biomarkers Group (Zhongli City, Taiwan)
Sponsored by smartphone manufacturer HTC, DBG is a group of Taiwanese and U.S. engineers and physicians. It is developing a tricorder primarily based on a sensor suite and imaging program to analyze vitals and samples of blood and urine.

Final Frontier Healthcare Devices (Paoli, Pa.)
3 brothers and a sister—with backgrounds in medicine, engineering, and laptop science—form the core of Final Frontier. Their tricorder involves a handheld device that makes use of optical sensors to steer clear of the need to have for blood samples.

MESI Simplifying Diagnostics (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
MESI is a startup founded by a group of physicians and engineers. Its tricorder consists of a medical-grade wristband, a smartphone app, and a handful of diagnostic modules for identification of certain ailments.

Scanadu (Moffett Field, Calif.)
With Scout, a handheld vitals scanner, Scanadu reached a record .6 million in crowdsourced funding in 2013. For its XPrize tricorder, the team might enhance Scout and combine it with a wearable device and a lab test kit.

SCANurse (London)
A diagnostic health-related manufacturer, SCANurse is hoping to develop a tricorder that is “minimally invasive,” employing sensors and computer vision anytime feasible instead of asking sufferers to provide blood or urine.

Zensor (Belfast, Northern Ireland)
The group is focusing on a wearable electrocardiogram sensor that also measures vitals like respiration rate and temperature. Diagnostics on blood and urine will be performed by a miniature microspectroscopy lab.

It&#8217s late February, and Aezon is reaching a vital phase of its project. Rypinski tells me the group has a quantity of functioning components but now needs to combine them into a comprehensive technique that can be delivered to the organizers in just 3 months. There&#8217s a limited quantity that she&#8217s prepared to share with me about her team&#8217s tricorder Aezon, like most other XPrize competitors, is keeping its technologies heavily under wraps.
Nonetheless, it&#8217s protected to say the different systems will most likely operate in a equivalent style. How? Say you&#8217re feeling ill. Most tricorders will probably incorporate an application running on a phone or tablet as the principal user interface. The app—a sort of AI doctor—will start by asking you a series of concerns: Do you have a headache? Are you feeling dizzy? Did you vomit? It could also ask you about your age, weight, height, and healthcare history.
Next, it will gather your vitals, measured by a sensing device you put on on your body—a fitness tracker–style wristband, or possibly an electronic necklace. (The competition calls for this monitor to be in a position to gather information for 72 hours, even although you sleep.) Based on your answers and important indicators, the app could ask you to carry out some additional tests. These you will do employing yet another piece of hardware, a type of “lab in a box” unit, which will be capable to execute particular diagnostic tests using samples of saliva, urine, or blood.
Finally, right after receiving the test outcomes and crunching all the other data, the app will give you a diagnosis and direct you to much more info such as reputable health-related sources or help groups for men and women with that disease. It could also include a “call your doctor” button, or it might even dial an emergency quantity.
Some teams are creating devices that you could mistake for a “Star Trek” prop. Scanadu, before it joined the XPrize competitors, ran a highly effective crowdfunding campaign to create Scout, a sleek white disc you location against your forehead. Packed with sensors, the small device measures heart price, skin and core body temperature, respiration rate, blood stress and oxygen saturation, and electrocardiogram (ECG) information. For the XPrize, it&#8217s unclear whether the firm will use the same device or enhance it, probably coupling it with a wearable accessory that can collect data more than longer periods.
Canadian team Cloud DX has made a futuristic-searching plastic collar to measure crucial signs. The U-shaped device wraps about your neck, and its extremities have electrodes that sit more than your chest to record your heart&#8217s electrical activity. Its tricorder also includes a lipstick-size scanning wand for skin and ear exams that its creators say “Dr. McCoy would be proud of,” referring to the USS
Enterprise&#8216s chief medical officer.
Sitting in the Biomedical
Engineering Design and style Studio, Rypinski and her colleagues look absolutely exhausted, and it seems like they&#8217re operating on small far more than determined enthusiasm. She tells me that soon after reading about the tricorder competitors in 2012, she sent e-mails to various departments at Johns Hopkins—known for its strong biomedical engineering program—to see if any individual was interested in forming a group. A lot of individuals showed up for the very first few meetings. The tough element was discovering men and women who would come back. “Over time, the individuals who were actually interested in the project stuck with it,” she says, “and right here we are.”
For the competition, Aezon adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy. The 30 or so group members formed tiny groups to investigate individual illnesses and determine which data they necessary to successfully diagnose each and every of them.
Two of Rypinski&#8217s colleagues—Alex Kearns, a mechanical engineering student, and Akshay Srivatsan, a laptop science student—tell me they have made a smartphone-based diagnostic app that works “the way a doctor thinks.” To do that, the app relies on a machine-finding out method identified as a naive Bayes classifier, which is commonly employed by researchers building such healthcare-diagnostic applications. The idea is to adjust the probability of a provided diagnosis every single time the method receives a new piece of data, which could incorporate symptoms, vitals, or lab benefits.
To collect important signs from patients, some Aezon team members developed a monitoring device to be worn about the neck. Its creators decided to form an independent company, Aegle, to raise funds and market place the monitor separately after the competition.
For some of its tests, Aezon has partnered with the Johns Hopkins BioMEMS &amp Single Molecule Dynamics Lab. The team is hoping that some micro- and nanoscale molecular evaluation methods lately developed at the lab could be employed in a quickly and inexpensive diagnostic test of blood samples.
For other tests, though, the group is turning to easier technologies. Cyrus Zhou, a biophysics main, and Ned Samson, a mechanical engineering student, are operating on a test for leukocytosis, which is an elevated white blood cell count. “Initially, we were going to make a microfluidic device,” says Samson. “But from the people we talked to, it&#8217s like a Ph.D. to do that.”
The students identified a commercially available chip that causes blood cells to spread out, creating them less complicated to see. They&#8217re now trying to combine the chip with a set of lenses that can act as a easy and affordable optical microscope. Their plan is to use the camera on the smartphone and Aezon&#8217s app to count white blood cells with computer vision. “It&#8217s got everything,” says Samson. “It&#8217s small, it&#8217s price efficient, it&#8217s doable.”
In between June and December of this year, XPrize will assess the teams&#8217 prototypes at the UC San Diego Medical Center. The effort will involve recruiting nearly 500 people—three customer testers per device, per condition—to get a representative result for every condition with each and every tricorder.
The winning team will be the a single that has the highest well being assessment score (based on the tricorder&#8217s potential to correctly recognize the condition that the user has) even though also getting among the five teams with the highest “consumer experience” score (based on the tricorder&#8217s aesthetic appeal, ease of use, and functionality).
“These devices should be able to function in such a way that a standard person with some understanding of smartphones should be capable to recognize how to operate them,” says Campany, the Tricorder XPrize director. “We&#8217ve put 45 percent of the score on the customer experience, due to the fact that&#8217s how important we believe it is.”
This assessment won&#8217t be a clinical trial, which would be far more challenging. Even if some of the tricorders operate well, there will nevertheless be a extended list of questions that will need to be answered ahead of the devices can be commercialized. Are they safe? Do they maintain a user&#8217s medical information private? Who&#8217s liable if there&#8217s a misdiagnosis?
A month right after my check out to Johns Hopkins, I check in with Rypinski to see how factors are going. Aezon has finalized the design and style of its tricorder and is now tweaking its components to make positive they perform properly with each other and offer you a cohesive user experience. Rypinski doesn&#8217t know how she will feel when the prototype lastly ships to XPrize—and there&#8217s absolutely nothing a lot more that her team (or any of the other teams) can do, in addition to wait for the results of the customer testing. Proper now she can barely find time to consume lunch.
“We have a actually tight deadline to meet,” she says. “After that, we&#8217ll have all the time in the globe.”
Tricorder stand-in
Your Smartphone
Can a smartphone tricked out with gizmos and apps replace a physician&#8217s traditional diagnostic tools? We&#8217ll soon discover out. Capitalizing on the impressive sensors and processing energy in nowadays&#8217s smartphones, startups are turning them into mobile diagnostic and monitoring instruments for both buyers and health care workers. As capable as some of these innovations currently are, it&#8217s unclear regardless of whether they will pass muster with government regulators, which is why a lot of of their makers are not however touting them as bona fide health-related devices. —Sarah Lewin

Pediatrics
Infant Important-Signs Checker
The Owlet Smart Sock keeps tabs on an infant&#8217s heart rate and blood-oxygen levels. LEDs shine red and infrared light via the foot, and sensors measure how that light is absorbed by oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules in arterial blood. The sock transmits this information over Bluetooth to a base station and to the smartphone of the nearby (and presumably anxious) parent.
Price: US (accessible for preorder)

Ophthalmology
Eye Examiner
The Transportable Eye Examination Kit (PEEK) adds a lens adapter to the smartphone&#8217s camera. Health care workers in remote places can then use the phone to scan a patient&#8217s retina for illness and to check for cataracts. Linked smartphone apps can be used to test the patient&#8217s vision.
Price tag: &pound70 (accessible for preorder not obtainable in the United States)

Otology
Eardrum Inspector
The Oto turns an iPhone into an otoscope that utilizes the telephone&#8217s camera to view the eardrum at high magnification. With the residence version, parents can send images of their young children&#8217s eardrums to on-get in touch with clinicians to diagnose middle-ear infections. A pro version enables doctors to share images with their individuals.
Price: US for the Oto Residence (currently obtainable only in California) 9 for the Oto Clinic

Cardiology
An ECG in Your Telephone
With the AliveCor Heart Monitor, a patient with a heart condition can gather a private electrocardiogram, a record of the heart&#8217s electrical activity. While the patient touches electrode-carrying sensors attached to the telephone&#8217s case, an connected app displays the patient&#8217s heart price and flags irregular rhythms recognized as atrial fibrillations. The app also transmits data to the patient&#8217s medical professional.
Cost: US

Illustrations: James Provost
Psychology
One thing to Watch Over You
Mental-well being clinicians can use the Mobile Therapy app to maintain tabs on individuals between sessions. The app uses self-reports, linguistic analysis, and smartphone sensors to gather information about the patient&#8217s feelings, behaviors, movements, and interactions with other folks. It then relays this information to the clinician, who can appear for trends and spot difficulty signs.
Price tag: US per year for a clinician

www.genphys.com/engineering/engineering-news/the-race-to-…

Mirai Suenaga Doll

Image by Danny Choo
I’ve documented the doll production process up until now in the following posts – even though they are distinct to dolls, you can apply the knowledge to make your personal figures and wot not.

#Fast Prototyping and You

#How To Mass Create Your Own Products

For these who cant be bothered to go through those posts, right here is a quite very rough breakdown (skipping a couple of processes) of what you want to make your personal dolls (or other merchandise).
Use Google Sensei to learn how to use 3D software program like I did – if you cant afford the cost tag of 3D computer software then there are free decent solutions like Blender.

In our case, we employed ZBrush for the modeling and tweaking making use of 3D Max.

Prep information for 3D printing.

Print 3D Data.

Make silicon molds from 3D printed information.

Make wax clone from silicone mold.

Electroform the wax clone to make the copper mold for mass production.

Pour soft vinyl into the molds to make the doll parts.

Cut off flash and assemble doll.

Make optical eyes.

Do the makeup.

Play with Mirai.

Purpose unlocked – proceed to boss level.

If you want to make your own items then commence consulting with Google Sensei – its totally free. Then after you are armed with knowledge, you can use that to commence implementing your suggestions.

If you want to generate your goods in Japan then I will hook you up with the men and women that you want to know who can oversee the production for you. If you are confident in your language skills and know sufficient about the production processes then I’ll introduce the factories to you.

If you dont have the cash to cover production then start off with what I did and work in a restaurant to save up. Quit providing oneself excuses and just do it.

View more at www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26928/Mirai+Suenaga+Doll.html

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