The Real Star Trek Tricorder

favorite is Star Trek. The Trek, the Trek, the one and only. Uh yeah, wait, wait, hold on, you got to say on the air, and people want to know, original series next Generation Voyager? Where are you? Uh? You know, when it comes down to the actual episode, I'm a next generation guy. When it comes to the films, I'm an original series guy. Um. I never really got into Voyager that much, although I understand it. If I had stuck with it, I probably would have enjoyed it. I

actually really like Deep Space nine. Yeah. I thought that the political elements of Deep Space nine were really interesting. Yeah. So we've talked about Star Trek tech on this show before. Yes, we have, and there's got to be a reason we're bringing up Star Trek again. Might it be there's a specific piece of technology on the enterprise that we want to delve into. Yes, those elevators, those lifts are amazing. They are They're kind of like wantavaders. They can go

sideways or diagonal ways. Okay, we want to talk about tri orders tricorders. Yeah. As it turns out, the tri quarter has been getting a lot of attention recently, mainly because of the announcement of specific teams that are competing to make a real one. Wait wait wait, wait wait, yeah, make a real one. Well, I mean it helps first to explained what a tricorder is, right, to understand why making a real one is kind of a big thing

in the first place. Yeah, okay, So a triquarter is a medical device mainly, although it can also be just an environmental sensor. Yeah. It's a scientific device in general, but frequently used in medicine. Yeah. Uh. Mr Spock often carried a tricorder on away missions. They would beam down to a planet. Mr Spock would look at the tricorder and say, Captain, it appears we can breathe very useful information, but seriously though it had. It had environmental sensors. Really

it was. It was like a magic sensor that could detect anything. It was. It was a little bit of a sonic screwdriver, it really was. It was very much like the Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver, and that it was capable of doing whatever the plot needed it too. But within the context of the shows, it either would give you information about your environment, whether something might be toxic or there might be contaminants in the environment. You you might be able to tell if someone else had visited

that same place that you visited. Let's say that it's a planet where it's pre warped technology planet, so the prime directive is in full effect, and you detect there's a signature here that states that we're not the first people to visit. That would be kind of a typical

Star Trek plot. But like you said, Lauren, more frequently than not, you also saw the triquarter being used in a medical capacity when Dr Bones McCoy would be using it to determine what sort of terrible ailment had befallen a crew member before harassibly saying that he needed to treat it. In some medieval terrible way. So the example I have here is, according to this in and Smith,

you have been stabbed by a klingon. That would be a diagnosis he would use after using the probe on a tricorder right right, which would be able to tell I don't know things about their vital signs or what's going on with their internal organs. Yeah, and detect anything like a like a pathogen, any sort of thing that would would affect the health in either a negative or a positive way. So wait a minute, No, I'm trying

to remember. To get a reading on someone, did he have to insert it directly into their torso he did not. There was a non invasive tool. There were versions that had a separate little uh probe, but it wasn't a probe that would actually be invasive. He would just you would hold it closer to the person. You would cover it near a person. It would make a little bloom kind of kind of noise. Yeah, and you you were required that you were required to move your hand while

doing it. Right. It wasn't like you just held it out to someone and you know, And this kind of ties into our discussions about in science fiction, you often have to have the actors do things so they don't feel like total idiots just standing there. What type of scanning device works better when you jiggle it around? Apparently a tricorder does. In the Star Trek universe. And these things look like giant cassette players. Do you get Do you guys remember cassette players? Yeah? Yeah, the kind of

where you had to actually hit the stop ejective. Hey, we're from the eighties, not look, I'm just saying fourteen and yeah, I'm just saying like, like like, by the time you guys were around, there were more advanced versions of the basic tape player available. When I'm thinking about the old gray and silver ones that had the big window that you hit and it would pop the cassette out, that's kind of what these early tricorders. Later next generation

it was more cell phone size. Yeah, okay, but surely there's nothing like that in real life. Is there like just this wonderful all purpose environmental medical sensor device. Well, there's certainly people working on making it a real thing. We're we're not quite at the point where someone has a device that has all the capability of the tricorder.

We certainly don't have one that is able to do everything from diagnose a patient to tell you whether or not there are toxins in the environment, to telling you if someone had been there recently. We don't have anything like that, but we do have lots of advanced sensors, I mean, medical technology in general, at least the the basic opponents have all evolved quite a bit over the last couple of decades, although you may not see that

reflected in any individual hospitals technology. Some hospitals are relying on technology that's uh, you know, several years old. Sure, well, but you know, the the need for or the desire for having non invasive technology, and especially noninvasive technology that patients themselves could use at home is tremendous and and

that is where the X Prize comes in absolutely. So you guys, before we even talk about the X Prize, I mean, we've talked about wearables on this this show before, right, We've talked about wearables that can monitor things like your heart rate. That sort of stuff very common, and it shows that people are really interested in getting data about themselves. So the ex Prize is taking it to that next step.

The idea of not just you know, what your heart rate is, but things like your respiration rate, how much oxygen is actually in your blood, really interesting vitals that go beyond this this sort of simplified approach that we see in things like fitness trackers. But the fact that fitness trackers are so popular shows that people are really interested in this and that it could in fact be

a huge benefit if used responsibly. That's something that I'm sure I'm going to mention a couple of times in this episode because one of the things I like to caution people about is don't ever assume that technology is going to completely replace the experienced and informed opinion of a medical professional. Oh, certainly not. And that's not that's not what they're going for here, right, It's just that's the way a lot of people tend to interpret it.

It's not the fault of the organization. It's not the fault of the different UH teams that are competing in this process. But often we think, oh, I have this gadget, and now I don't ever have to worry about going to a doctor unless something goes hard, doably wrong. We have this kind of reactionary approach to medicine here in the United States, and that's just something I don't want to advocate for. UH. I would frame it more in

these terms. It's not so much that you have a gadget that replaces a doctor, but you have a gadget that replaces Google and hypochondria and and it also it also can augment what a doctor is able to do if you are able to go like if you start to see something that worries you, you can go to a doctor and say, I don't know what this means, but this these are the readings and getting so does

this mean that there's something I should worry about? And from that point for where the doctor can handle things and make sure that you're getting the treatment you need if you need it, you may not, And that's that's the important thing to remember. Now. The really cool thing is that you have this ex prize in the first place. And anyone who's been following technology and science has probably

heard of the ex prize. UH. It really started back in the nineteen nineties, and the original focus of it was to kind of kick start private space exploration projects, right. It was that whole prize of will give a certain amount of money to whichever team can have a spacecraft that can visit space within the span of two weeks. This was before SpaceX and etcetera. Yeah, yeah, so this is the sort of thing that was supposed to fuel

that kind of innovation and it worked. We now have private companies that are working on developing stuff that goes out into space, some of which, like SpaceX, has already done it successfully a couple of times. So then you had X Prizes come up for other types of uses of technology, other innovation, not just space exploration, and one of those was the the Tricorder Challenge, which is sponsored

by Qualcom. It has a ten million dollar prize for whichever team can create a tricorder that performs according to the contest criteria, and they set out exactly what this device is supposed to be able to do, and they leave a lot of the implementation up to the actual teams, so no one is forced into a specific form factor apart from some weight requirements. Right, So first you have to be able to diagnose twelve required core health conditions.

Now I'm just gonna list some of these. These are not all of them, but it includes anemia, diabetes, hepatitis, a pneumonia, sleep apnea, tuberculosis. It has to be able to detect all of those, so they're twelve in total,

and that's not an option. You have to figure out how your device can detect such a thing present in a patient that's using it, sure, and it also has to be able to detect the absence of anything wrong, right, It has to be able to tell you that if the person uses it and they don't have any of these conditions, that everything is far relatively normal and healthy, probably at least physically. Mentally. It's still just a roll of the dice, folks. Now, on top of the twelve

required ones, you have to pick three elective conditions. So this is like an elective in a college course where you think, all right, you, these are the course requirements. These are the courses you have to take in order to graduate. And then here are the ones you can choose from as your electives. Same sort of thing. So they have to pick three of one of the following

and this is just a selection of them. Allergens, cholesterol screening, food born illnesses, HIV screening, hypertension, melanoma, osteoporosis, pertussis, shingles or strep throat and more. So you have to pick three of those. Uh, there are a couple of other choices that are also on the list, and then beyond that, the device must also be able to get accurate readings on five vital signs, which those are blood pressure, heart rate,

oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and your body temperature. The prototype device cannot weigh more than five pounds, A big thing, Yeah, because I mean it might be a lot easier to do this if you build this giant right right, Yeah, you're or a bed like you Just the patient lays in here and all the sensors are are part of the bed, and then we lay this, you know, covering over the has even more sensors on it. Obviously, that would not win in this particular approach. Can the device

be a toilet? A toilet that weighs less than five pounds? They actually do say that that the method of getting this information is up to the individual company. But here's the kicker. Consumer consumer use experience is also a factor when it comes to judging the success or failure of the tri quarter. So it's not prioritize things that are less unpleasant, Yes, exactly, Yeah, so would a consumer want

to use this device? So if it's a device that's going to require something like a blood sample that's going to be a bigger challenge than something that is totally noninvasive. This means that the front teams have to take that into consideration when they're making their designs. So it maybe that you're able to get much more accurate information with something that's invasive. But on the flip side, maybe people wouldn't want to use it because it would mean having to,

you know, prick a finger or otherwise get a blood sample. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe that there's a disposable uh liquid container that's meant for urine samples. In fact, I've heard of some that do that. So that would be one of those cases where you measure the benefit of the metric you're looking for and the method you're looking you're using to look for it versus our consumers actually going to do this or will they be turned off by the idea. So

you have to judge that as well. And then eventually they're going to have tests for these things. That's actually coming up in two thousand fifteen. We're recording this in early September two fourteen, so next year, as the recording of this podcast, they will be putting these two to tests and they'll be diagnostic tests to make sure the device does what it's supposed to do, as well as consumer tests to make sure that people would want to use it, and if it does well in those tests,

then that's what sets it above the other competitors. Eventually, the judges will make their decisions, they'll deliberate, and in sometime in two thousand sixteen, there will be a complete awards ceremony where they will announce which team came up

with the winning tricorder design UH. As a part of this, the FDA, the Food Drug and Drug Administration in the United States, is also involved in this competition and is discussing what sort of regulatory requirements would be in place for them to get the device cleared by the FDA so it could be used medically. And that means that you have essentially the FDA working as a consultant in your design process, which saves so much time. It's not

so much a um. You don't have to worry as much about the submission process, the testing, and then they get back to you and tell you what you have to address in order to get FDA approval. I mean that will still be part of it, but this helps smooth out some of the potential roadblocks along the way, which I think is pretty cool. Okay, well, so do we have any idea yet who's actually in the running

and what they're working on. Yeah. It's actually kind of funny because, um, when I recorded the video that goes along with this audio podcast, I didn't realize that at the time, but the ten finalist teams had just been announced and I mean possibly that day, I think, yeah, I And it just so happened that I was researching GET the day the information it came out. I didn't

know it was brand new information. I thought, oh, well, I guess these teams have been announced for a while, because this competition has been was has been announced for a couple of years, right, It's not like this is brand new, y. I think when it was announced at the time there were two dred and fifty five teams in competition. Um, later that was a narrowed to four. Yeah, and it's now been whittled down to ten teams, so ten teams are still competing. These teams had to make

a real commitment to be part of this competition. It's not something that you can just enter for free. You actually have to pay an entrance fee. Uh. And the way the entrance fee worked was that the earlier you registered, the less expensive. The fee was began at five thousand dollars. So when I say less expensive, I'm still talking about a healthy chunk of change. Right. Some of these teams are little divisions of various companies. Some of them are

partnerships between companies. But if you waited, if you dragged your feet and you waited to register, at the end of the period, you were paying around twenty five thousand dollars for your team to be part of this competition. So pretty impressive call now and save now. Granted, keep in mind, if you are the team that develops the right piece of technology, it's a ten million dollar prize. And here's the other interesting thing. I think about the

X Prizes. A lot of times the X Prize award is less money than what it would have cost in research and development to develop the the actual technology. Well, but hopefully you're creating a piece of technology that you

that is a real investment. Yeah, it turns out that I think a lot of teams compete not thinking oh, we're going to make this huge amount of money at the end of it, but rather they're competing because one they really believe in the competition, they believe in the goal, right and to they realize that if they win, it's not so much the money that's the big the big draw, it's the fact that you are the ex prize winner exactly. Even just being a finalist, you might get some publicity,

like we're about to give right now. Who are some of these finals? All right? So from the United States, this is a global challenge, So we've got countries all over the world that have teams participating. In the US has the most teams that made it in the final ten Uh to the tune of four teams Aison, d m I, the final Frontier Medical Devices, Get That Star, trek UH and Scana Do which start Olivia Newton John

was amazing. One of the first blog posts we ever wrote for our website was about the Scanna Do Scout, wasn't it. Yeah, We'll actually have some some extensive quotes from Lauren's blog post, which is, by the way, a fantastic read. So it was written all the way back in two thousand thirteen, but is still absolutely relevant. So you should definitely if you haven't followed the forward thinking blogs. Go check it out. There's some great stuff on there,

some of it even I wrote. So the United Kingdom has two teams scan Nurse and sen Sore are both from the UK. Then you have Canada's cloud d x UH, and you have Slovenia's Messy Simplifying Diagnostics UH. From Taiwan is Dynamical Bio Markers Group and from India is Davontry. So these are the teams that are left. These are the final hen and they're all working on different implementations of this. Some of them, like I said, require like a blood sample, so that's going to make it a

more challenging approach. When it comes to that consumer use, which are the ones that require tears. You just want someone to be weeping into a device, and that tells you whether or not you're your Well, I'd probably rather weep into a device than bleed into it. I can understand that, but I think I think what would be terrible is that I if I were making such a device and you wept into it, the only result you would ever get as it seems you are sad, and

that would be well, that's not helpful at all. The future is in your tears. Well, the interesting one to look at right now, I think, I mean, all of these are interesting. But like you said, Joe, we we've actually have someone here who's looked into the Scanna do one specifically. Yeah, And they held an Indiego go campaign back for a product called This's Going to Do Scout, which is not going to be the final product for

competition in in the tri quarter X Prize. However, it's it's related certainly, and and it's a it's an interesting funding project for the whole thing. The original goal for the campaign was a hundred thousand dollars. Did they make it? They raised one point six million? What high woe? Yeah, so it was doing okay for itself. And they also raised another ten point five million in private financing. By the end of that ten million X Prizes looking pretty good.

Uh So, this, this Scout is not really intended to to be a diagnostic tool as much as a monitoring instrument. Right, this isn't this like you said, this isn't their tri quarter. This is this was something that's sort of a first step, like a good a good foundation to work toward a triquarder. But it was really more about vital signs as opposed to all this diagnostic stuff right right with it with an emphasis on that non invasive kind of thing. Um.

You know. It's it's this little gadget like like the size of a of a makeup compact or a hockey puck or something like that, and you hold it between two fingers too specific fingers um, and hold it up to your forehead and it can give you all of this vital sign stuff and it will connect automatically to an app that will record the data, can record it over time for you can analyze it a little bit and can let you upload it to your your doctor

eventually if if you need to. That is still in development, So this is all kind of hypothetical, right, Well, that's really cool stuff. I mean the idea that you yourself are completing a circuit and that's what allows this device to actually take those readings right right this This is where that specific part comes in because it's the thumb and four finger of your left hand, and so you're

completing this this bio circuit. Right electrodes touching the head and one finger function as an electric cardiogram or ECG that that measures your heart rate and rhythm against the other finger. There's a photo thesmo graph or PPG. That is a thing. Are you making this up? That? I feel like I've talked about it on this very show you probably over a year ago. There's a great so many, so many syllables. All right, So what does that do? UM?

It reads your blood flow through your skin, usually using lasers or some some other kind of light based thing, and will measure your blood's oxygen saturation. UM. There's also an infrared thermometer touching your head that will take your temperature. So so yeah, it's uh. It can analyze all this data within like ten seconds hypothetically and send it via bluetooth to your smartphone UM and and connect with that

app hypothetically. They'll also include like a little gidget to connect to your map function in your phone, so that if you do need medical attention, it can do to you to your local doctor or hospital. Oh yeah, so like you could say, like I'm not I'm feeling a little weird, and you hold it up and then it takes your readings and then it says, okay, well if you need to go to the urgent care center, it

might be you know, take this route. That's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, although really, you know, like like we've been saying, the real idea behind behind the scout in specifically in the ex Prise in general is is to not you know, direct you to a doctor, but to kind of put this capacity within the hands of of consumers, right uh, certainly for diagnostics, yeah, they said in the x Prise itself, it says that these devices are not necessarily meant to

get to a point where you could get a prescription based off the reading of the device, But they said that in the future we may even have gadgets that are able to do that, although you'd more likely see that under the under the umbrella of an official medical facility, right right, But you know, just saving time with you know, a not having to you know, not having you have to go to a doctor's office unnecessarily say that doctor's time, so that they can treat patients who really need help.

So do you know if the name Scanna Do is supposed to be a mashup of the movie Scanners in the movies Zanna Do Gosh, I hope so I know it's a reference to Zanna Do, not the movie necessarily, No, I think it's probably the poem. But I love the idea. I love the idea of going around on roller skates, sing Olivia John and then your head explodes. That's what I was imagining when you all were talking about this device. Yeah, that'd be That'd be a pretty fantastic movie. Okay, someone

call Olivia Newton John. We we need this. Ye, this is an important film, start a kickstarter. I legitimately love Olivia Newton John, so I will brook no actual mocking of her. Um so, no mocking. That sounds like a great movie fantasy the same page transitions as much as we all love Zanna Do and Scanners. Yes, okay, Jonathan, I heard you met some kind of medical device heroes at the con this weekend. I did. I actually talked to some folks who were interested in this, some of

whom have worked on projects like this. Whether or not they're actually part of the the X Prize, I know one of them had been part of it. I don't know if he's part of the ten teams that have made that final cut, because while I was at Dragon Con, that's when this announcement came out. So it's possible that he had been part of one of the thirty some

odd teams before it got cut down to ten. But they were talking about their reasons for getting involved in the first place, which I think will stay true whether they're part of the X Prize or not, because I know that a lot of these um organizations are looking at funding from various different groups, not just not just

the X Prize. And uh, he was specifically thinking about creating a trike order like device for medical professionals to make their jobs easier, so getting vitals would be much more easy thing to do, and that you could continuously monitor those vitals. So this would be a device that presumably a patient would wear in some way or would otherwise be close enough to the pay to to have a continuous monitoring situation going on. Because he was saying,

there are a lot of issues with things like sepsis. Uh. You know, patients who go through surgery can suffer from sepsis, which is essentially blood poisoning. One of the most common causes of that as infection that there's some sort of infection comes up. That's why you see doctors and nurses

with face masks on. It's not so that they don't get sick and so that they don't share their germs with patients, right, So, uh, sepsis can be really, really a dangerous situation if you if you're suffering from it, you may you may die. It can be deadly. Especially it's especially dangerous because it is difficult to diagnose until there's already a problem. Absolutely, yes, it can. It can reach its problem exactly, can reach a critical level before

you're even aware that there's something serious going on. Uh. And even if you are able to you detect it, you know, late in the game and save the patient's life. There can be some life altering issues that result from this, like organ dysfunction or even having to have a limb amputated due to this. So we're talking about a really

serious issue. And the thought is that with a continuous monitoring system, it can look for tiny, uh, tiny examples of things that might indicate that there are the conditions right for sepsis to happen, right, so that you can monitor it much more closely and intervene earlier before it becomes a serious issue. So if you pair this with a really uh, particularly complex algorithm, something that is really good at detecting these minute changes and raising an alert

before it becomes a serious concern. The hope is that you save patient lives and improve quality of life post surgery. So that seem is like a really awesome goal to me. I mean, the idea of let's let's cut this down and make sure that people are having as good a an experience as they possibly can. I mean, surgery is already so traumatic for so many different reasons. You want to be able to minimize that trauma as much as

you possibly can. And on that vein, there are other medical devices out there that have been proposed that aren't TRIKE orders. They're not meant to monitor or diagnose patients, but are rather meant to help surgeons do their work by making fewer mistakes in the process. And what there's one that's being developed out of the St. Michael's Hospital

in Toronto that's dubbed the Surgical black Box exactly. And the idea is that it's a series of cameras that would be set up in the surgical room, surgical theater, whatever, microphones as well, uh and very complex computer algorithms that would study the movements a surgeon makes in real time for whatever surgical procedure it happens to be and make sure that the surgeon is operating within the right parameters. Uh And according to doctor Teodor Grant Sharoff, who works

at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, he did us. He did a study where he looked at specific surgeries and he looked very closely and saw that even experienced surgeons were making up to twenty mistakes in a single surgical procedure. Now, these mistakes might not be life altering, they might not even be that that dangerous, They might not have any kind of negative impact on the patient, but they were

still a mistake. And you figure, the more surgeries you have to perform within a given time frame, the more likely you are to make a mistake. Alert fatigue starts to set in. And the idea is that this device would this system, it's not even a device. The system would help surgeons by alerting them before they make a mistake. If they start to make a move that would result in mistake, they could be alerted, they could refocus and continue and thus eliminate more mistakes through a process, which

I think is pretty cool. It's also I mean, just imagine how I I don't know how to implement that in a way that wouldn't be incredibly distracting if you're talking about twenty mistakes in a single procedure. Uh, then if it's going to alert you twenty times in a procedure, I mean, imagine driving a car and it's alerting you every time you do anything that is remotely outside the norm.

So um iteration. Yeah, it would be a little that would be a frustrating experience every time you drive on the sidewalk I'm thinking of I actually free single time. I actually know someone who had a car. I think it was a rental are. It wasn't like their own car, but they had a car that would chime at you if you got to uh, like if you went above the speed limit for an area. Now, folks, we live in Atlanta, and if you are driving on one of the highways in Atlanta and you're driving the speed limit,

you are going to cause an accident. Yeah, that was way too slow for traffic. Most of the time, I would be skeptical that the car accurately knows the speed limit for any given space. Yeah. It may have even been that it just had a setting where it would chime if you win above, like if you win above fifty per hour, right, and which case you'd be yeah, exactly like, well, now the bombs activated, so you're just gonna have to keep going like this forever. Um. Yeah,

it was. It was. It was maddening to ride in that vehicle because now the person driving it seemed to be acclimated to it, but to anyone else, they think exactly like, if you're worrying it, then clearly it's not working in the first place. But any other passenger in that vehicle couldn't have a conversation because you just go crazy. But anyway, I assume that maybe uh, in the case of surgery, obviously you're talking about uh, a very delicate line of work that has huge impact to alter the

life of the person that you're working on. So maybe in that situation it would be greeted more with, you know, a welcoming kind of of response, especially since if you even just want to get cynical and say I'm just

gonna be totally just pragmatic. It cuts down on chances of things like like uh, malpractice, because if you're alerted ahead of time before it happens, then you can correct and if there are any complications that happened afterward, you may say, well, there were complications, but we have this record here that shows that our surgeon did everything exactly right. So you know, sometimes complications happen even if everything went

as plans planned. Yeah. I also keep in mind that many surgeries occur over the course of hours and hours, and so twenty mistakes, you know, it sounds like a lot, perhaps if you're not thinking about the fact that I don't know how long these surgeries took. It might have been an eight hour periods were made. And again, when we say mistake, it could be something really really minor

that ultimately didn't have an impact on the surgery. But it's still something that didn't happen as planned or didn't happen the way that technically it should have happened. So that's really interesting to me too. I'm really curious to follow this story further find out who's going to be the winner. Um. I hope that all the different teams are able to produce things that end up being really effective, whether it's in the original intended implementation or it evolves

into something else. I think it's really exciting. This is very interesting. I mean, I wonder how non invasive it can get. Yeah, like, can it be something that is literally really like the scout where you hold it to your your temple and it's able to get a reading, or are we going to have to have some sort of sampling of body fluid or something. Company is also

creating a urine test device. Yeah. Yeah, anything that can sample body fluids is obviously a different kind of category than something that you're just holding up to a person generally at them. Yeah. I mean, it's so like the non contact waving. Do do we think that's even realistic even in the long term. I don't know. I'm I'm kind of skeptical because I don't I don't even know how that would work if you're not even you know,

touching somebody's skin. I think that if if the sensory technology from what I know about stuff like the ppg um, if if laser sensoring advanced to a point that you could really do that quick of a sweep and it could accurately measure almost the way that like ultrasound works right now, um, what's going on inside of you? Then maybe, But that is such a science fictional concept according to me right now that I mean, based on my albeit limited knowledge, I can't see that happening for forty years

at least. I think. I think it requires a couple of things, and both of them are are big. One of them is, like you were saying, Lauren, the maturation of censoring technology so that they're able to pick up

on very very subtle things very quickly and reliably. The other is identifying what those subtle things are for the case of every single possible disease or condition, and taking into account the fact that that many things have similar symptoms, and furthermore that there's there's also just like a lot of noise going on. Yeah, you know, it's exactly there could be stuff that that is outside the norm but isn't particularly dangerous or relevant to whatever is really the cause.

I think at first it would probably be more like like web MD, where you know, like you stand someone and it's just like, well, probably you have cancer, right, or it'll say like you either have a headache or leprosy. Tass a coin. So I am. I'm with you, Lauren. I'm skeptical as well, Joe, What about you? What do you think I just said I was skeptical? Oh are you also scold? Maybe I didn't say I thought I

implied you probably did, and I just already forgot. I don't know what I'm saying is I'm skeptical about the no the no context R. Yeah, I don't know how that would work. Um, but I mean I'm no expert, obviously, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I would love it if we are amazed and find out that there is some sort of new way of doing that that would be phenomenal. But even if that never comes to pass, the work that these teams are doing is really inspiring to me, so I wish them all

the best. I cannot wait to see which one of them walks away with the prize. And UH, I really am eager to find, doubt what what the other teams do as well. I mean, I think, I really think that everyone working on this is UH doing so that we all stand to benefit in one way or another

from the work. So it's really exciting. If you guys out there have any suggestions for future episodes of forward thinking, Maybe there's some other X Prize you've always wanted to learn more about, or maybe there's some other type of technology or just an element of human existence and you're thinking what's that going to be like fifty years from now, hundred years from now. You should let us know. We'll take a look at it. We'll do a podcast about it,

maybe we'll do a video about it. Drop us a line on Twitter, on Facebook or Google Plus, or handle it. All three is FW thinking, and we'll talk to you again really sooner. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places