Real-life tricorders for health and environment

I last mentioned tricorder becoming real in July.  The Space.com story described a purely medical device.  Now USCD and San Diego State are both working on tricorder like devices which will not only monitor human health, but also the environment.

UCSD: Research Team Enlists 'Citizen-Sensors' to Improve World Health

Enterprising researchers and students at UC San Diego are looking for funding to complete a "citizen-sensor" project that they hope will revolutionize global health and environmental monitoring -- especially in remote and undeveloped areas of the planet. They also hope to attract the faith and funding of people around the world through the open, global crowd-funding resource Indiegogo, the first partnership between UC San Diego and a funding platform.

UCSD via University of California has the press release: Using 'citizen-sensors' to improve world health.
Date: 2013-12-12

“What if you could hold the power of modern medical equipment in the palm of your hand?” they ask. The device the students call “a cool gizmo” can also monitor your environment’s health by sampling the air, soil, and water for pollutants, then analyze and report the findings.

For non-Star Trek fans, the gizmo is much like the “tricorder” of the popular sci-fi series — a nifty hand-held device used for scanning, analyzing, and recording data. Less evocatively named, but nearly as high-tech, the UC San Diego device is called the Open Health Stack.

It would beneficially alter the landscape of the medical economy, researchers say, first by changing how people sense and perceive their own health, and then by collecting enough data to enable changes to environmental practices or policies.

Making those ambitious goals a reality is the role of their Distributed Health Lab, a collaboration between UC San Diego’s School of Medicine and the Qualcomm Institute, the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

The Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize was mentioned in the UCSD video.  It turns out that SDSU is also competing: SDSU Team Advances in Global Competition.
SDSU’s X-Team is now one of 33 teams competing for the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE.
By Beth Downing Chee
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
By Beth Downing Chee

When San Diego State University's X-Team entered the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition in April, there were more than 300 teams intending to compete. Now just 33 teams remain in the 3.5-year global competition.

Sponsored by the Qualcomm Foundation, XPRIZE will award $10 million to teams that develop a consumer-friendly mobile device that could change the face of health care.

The SDSU X-Team aims to be one of them.

We do indeed live in science fiction times.