The ‘Star Trek’ Tricorder Is Real
In Star Trek, an away team is teleported to an alien planet or ship, a humanoid is unconscious, but one of the members of the away team — hopefully not a red shirt — takes out their medical tricorder and scans them. The tricorder tells the crew member what is wrong with that person immediately. Instead of being and EMS person getting witness accounts and looking over the body of an injured person, wouldn’t it be better if they could just take out a medical tricorder to see what the problem is? We may be getting to that point.
A portable device has been designed to find infections but also detect how the patient’s immune system is reacting to it. This could allow for doctors to predict how bad the disease could potentially be.
The point of care device sensor is will allow for doctors to predict and react to diseases based on each patient. If a doctor knows the severity or potential severity of the disease, then they can apply treatment accordingly. The device, which is being developed by a European Union funded project, will be able detect invading pathogens, as well as how the molecules in the immune system respond to the disease in the patient.
Leopold Georgi of Technische Universitat Berlin, who’s coordinating the Platform for ultra-sensitive Point-of-Care diagnostics for infectious diseases (PoC-ID) project, has quite a bit of information on the device to give us: “It’s quite hard to say with RSV if it will be severe enough for the infant to be hospitalised, or if it will be just a small fever,” said Georgi. “That is why we want to measure the immune response, because our immune system has the best biosensors you can have, better than any we technologists can make, so we want to combine the sensor technology of the body with sensors to identify the pathogen itself,” he explained.
Sure, there will be much more experimentation to get this device to hit the levels we’ve seen in Star Trek, but if it can scan levels of severity of disease, it could prevent people from being over medicated or under medicated. Many reasons people can get even sicker is because the doctors will misdiagnose and give a patient something they don’t need. One common misconception is that you don’t give someone antibiotics for a viral infection. Bacterial infections are treated by antibiotics, not viruses.
This device, when perfected, should be a staple in every ambulance and hospital room.
(Via The Engineer)
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post,UPROXX,BGR and by just looking up his name.
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