“Knowing what we know now, I would say it’d probably take years” to develop a commercial version of the Star Trek Tricorder, Dr. Sunny Kohli told the Globe. “By the time XPrize is complete, I’m very confident that it would be months.”
TORONTO – An Indo-Canadian led-team has made the shortlist in a multimillion-dollar contest to turn a fictional technology from Star Trek into a real, marketable product, reported the Globe and Mail newspaper.
The ClouDX device traces its roots to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and it was Toronto physician named Sonny Kohli, in the disaster-stricken country at the time to provide medical assistance, who quickly found that some of the hospitals in the country lacked basic diagnostic equipment, forcing him and other medical workers to build their own makeshift alternatives.
“If you can build something portable, something inexpensive, something mobile … that would instantly empower a physician and help them manage a condition,” said Dr. Kohli, the team lead for ClouDX.
“Nobody’s put it all together yet.”
Much like the foundation’s space-travel challenges, the Tricorder prize is specifically designed to greatly reduce the time it will likely take for such devices to hit the marketplace. The foundation has already partnered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure that whatever devices the winning teams produce will not face long regulatory waiting times.
“Knowing what we know now, I would say it’d probably take years” to develop a commercial version of the Star Trek Tricorder, Dr. Kohli told the Globe. “By the time XPrize is complete, I’m very confident that it would be months.”
The XPrize Foundation plans to announce the 10 finalists in its “Tricorder” contest on Wednesday. The contest challenges teams to build a real-world replica of the Tricorder from Star Trek – a wand-like device that, when waved at a patient, can instantly diagnose a variety of maladies. Within the next 14 months, the finalists will be given the task of developing functional prototypes and testing them on patients. The three winning teams will ultimately share a $10-million (U.S.) purse, of which the grand prize winner will take $7-million.
The Xprize Foundation is expected to name a winner around January, 2016 – a date chosen to coincide with Star Trek’s 50th anniversary.
