Qualcomm offers $10M for a real-life tricorder, not a moment too soon

I saw on EDA360 Insider that Qualcomm is offering a $10M prize for the first non-invasive health diagnostic tool, to be called the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize. For those of you who are rusty on your Star Trek plot lines, the tricorder is the piece of equipment that would take a quick scan of an injured or sick human (non-human, too? I don’t remember) and instantly diagnose both the problem and the treatment.

The winning team will be the one with the technology which most accurately diagnoses a set of diseases without using a doctor or nurse, and that provides the best consumer user experience. (Which pretty much lets out those probes that feature so prominently in alien abduction stories.) It will capture metrics for patient health which could include blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. Apparently the device can useskin-level sensors or electrodes.

Looking down the road, Qualcomm sees this tool collecting large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements. Non-invasive means no biopsies, no blood tests. Excellent. The only limitation is that the tool and any components combined must weigh no more than 5 pounds.

Why is there a need for such a device, and hence such a prize? Qualcomm says, “In virtually every industry, end consumer needs drive advances and improvements. Except in healthcare. Very few methods exist for consumers to receive direct medical care without seeing a healthcare professional at a clinic or hospital, creating an access bottleneck.”

Qualcomm implies that the benefits of having a tricorder-like device are to by-pass the personnel shortage and thus save time and money. I think there’s another benefit that could be just as great: The diagnosis and ensuing care could be much better from a computer than from a human. Paraphrasing from the Qualcomm site, a tricorder-like device will go a long way towards transforming healthcare by turning the “art” of medicine into a science.

I have been in three different hospitals in the past month for various family members, and in each case there were pretty severe mistakes made due to human error: Misreading charts, wrong drugs prescribed, and incorrect surgical procedures.  Yet these medical professional personnel were perfectly competent individuals. They are human beings dealing with a system that is really, really complicated. When the only drugs that existed were aspirin and morphine, and patients were being treated for one of the few diseases that medical “science” was able to treat, then complex drug interactions, surgical procedures tied to lab diagnoses, etc, etc, were possible for mere humans to track. This is no longer the case.

You’ve probably heard of hospitals that were able to remarkably improve their success rates by implementing checklists for procedures. The concept of checklists in hospitals has been championed by Dr. Atul Gawande, who also writes for The New Yorker and has published a book, “The Checklist Manifesto”.

From a review of the book by Malcolm Gladwell: “Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). [italics added]  Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it’s just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality.”

Computers are really, really good at keeping track of what we know, and also at following checklists. Combine these characteristics with some clever sensor systems, and you just might come up with a tricorder. And not a moment too soon.

Bones, we’re ready.