Hi all,
There is a new X prize coming up, to make a medical "tricorder" with a $10 million dollar prize, the exact details of the device requirements aren't released yet, but it made me start to think about cheaper and simpler ways to measure things..
Here is the link to the prize:
cheers, Jamie
This decade, if you want somebody to give you a bucket of money, throw the phrase "smart phone" into your pitch.
Of course, the big boys have sunk far more than $10 mil into this, but perhaps this will shake loose some new ideas.
The holy grail of portable diagnostics is called "CNIBP", for Continuous Non Invasive Blood Pressure. There's simply no way to continuously, non-invasively monitor a person's blood pressure with any accuracy. I've always found that fascinating, and use it in my instrumentation talks, to drive home the point that it's sometimes hard to tell how difficult a measurement problem will be. We can measure the distance to the moon with an accuracy of 1mm. I can measure your blood oxygen to better than a percent by shining light through your skin, but I can't tell your blood pressure without clamping on something uncomfortable and restrictive, and even then, my accuracy will be 10% at best.
-Jim MacA.
Hi,
What about using 3d ultrasound to image the heart and then also listening to it acoustically? I'm not saying this would work to determine blood pressure, but I know there is a lot of unused data in simple measurements that could theoretically be used. A lot of blood pressure depedent data will go into the ultrasound ADC's and the acoustic ADC, the tricky part is trying to figure out how to separate this from all the other variables that make up the 3D shape and sound of the heart. Ideally a simple measurement device would quantify as many variables as possible, that is the interesting part to figure out how to do that. I think a simple 1kV pulsed spark gap with good measurement circuitry could theoretically be used as a mass spectrometer with enough effort or also many other things!
cheers, Jamie
Well, they've already done the huge flat-screen display and the "tapes," which are multi-gigabyte "thumb" drives; I'm holding out for the replicator and the transporter.
And warp drive, of course. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
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