Earlier this year at South by Southwest, the X Prize Foundation inspired the debut of Cloud DX, an adaptation of a fitness tracker that served as one of the first working prototypes of a Star Trek tricorder. Six other finalists have made it into the qualifying round with Cloud DX to win the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a $10 million purse that’s been several years in the making. Final testing of the prototypes ends this week, with the winner announced in January.
But it was last year, in 2014, that a Chinese company called Viatom Technology released the “CheckMe health monitor.” It contains an ECG, pulse oximeter, thermometer, and blood pressure detector, as well as all the bells and whistles of a regular fitness tracker. It can monitor a patient even while they’re asleep, so long as they’re wearing the device.
The FDA just cleared it for use in the United States, which means China’s winning the race in nerdiest Bluetooth technology.
The CheckMe Pro can do up to 10 hours of pulse ox monitoring and then store all the data it’s gathered, so it can be presented to a physician later (or transmitted via wizardry). There’s a touch screen display that instructs you how to use it at home, eliminating a lot of errors in the readings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYZestTP7bg
Of course, the tricorders on Star Trek could just be waved in front of your face and diagnose you thoroughly.
But this, coupled with the possibility of a real warp drive, make the decision to move to Bozeman, Montana to welcome the early arrival of the Vulcans all the more reasonable.
And it’s also pretty cool that you can send your pediatrician real information they can use to make a diagnosis without having to drag your sick child into the doctor’s office.
via MedGadget