Sometimes in life you just don’t see things coming.
For example, when I was going to high school in Red Deer back in the late 1980s, I would have never guessed that the NDP would have ever been able to form a government in Alberta.
Certainly not in my lifetime, but here we are in the first term of a Rachel Notley. Now I’m not trying to start a political debate by saying whether this is a good or bad thing, but I’m just saying never in my wildest dreams did I ever think it was even a possibility.
Over the course of my lifetime I have seen a number of these types of events take place, as I am sure the majority of our readers have as well. After all the longer a person has been on this planet the more probable the odds of something coming along that you’ve never seen increase exponentially.
For instance, I’m sure my mother, who grew up in rural Saskatchewan, without running water and electricity, couldn’t have even conceived of the possibility of man walking on the moon, but yet it happened.
This weekend, I had another one of those not in my lifetime moments on a trip into the city. Listening to Quirks and Quarks I heard of something I thought would be forever locked into the world of science fiction, the tricorder, or to be more specific, a medical tricorder.
I am sure most of you know what I am talking about. The device Dr. Leonard McCoy on Star Trek would hold in his hand and wave over his patient in almost every episode to diagnose and treat whatever ailment a member of the Enterprise’s crew or visiting alien may have been inflicted with.
It truly was an amazing gizmo that that never failed to give McCoy the proper information to save whoever he was treating. Unless you were one of the unfortunate redshirted security members who were killed in almost every episode.
However, it looks like this device may actually be close to reality and the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE is offering $10 million for any group who are able to come up with a working version of a tricorder.
The goal of the contest is to foster commercialization of the technologies needed to build sophisticated in-home diagnostic and monitoring devices. For example, Cloud DX, a Canadian company, is working on a system that uses sensors from a collar that goes around a person’s neck to an earpiece, which measure everything from blood pressure, respiration, ECG, pulse, blood oxygen saturation, and body temperature. This information is then transmitted to a base station that uses a smartphone or tablet as a display and relays data to be analyzed. Also part of the system is the universal diagnostic stick (USD). The USD is designed to diagnose diabetes, tuberculosis, and pneumonia among others. It can take a finger-prick to draw blood, and blood samples can be tested directly by the base station. The combination-scanning wand uses a camera to examine the skin, and includes a built-in otoscope for ear examinations and a spirometer to measure exhaled breath.
Not quite a tricorder yet, but you can add that to the list of things I would have never imagined I would see in my lifetime.
