Live long and prosper
Star Trek inspires doctors
An emergency room doctor and his three siblings have helped create a tricorder, a portable device that could tell whether you had pneumonia or diabetes or a dozen other conditions all by yourself.
The Star Trek-inspired gizmo could also monitor your blood pressure, heart rate and other health vitals.
Basil Harris and his siblings are part of a seven-member team that is one of two finalists for the US$9 million (NZ$12.8m) XPrize, an international innovation competition.
You may recall the tricorder from Star Trek. The Harris siblings named their team Final Frontier Medical Devices and the three brothers happily posed in Star Trek uniforms.
The original tricorder did a lot of trippy things, but basically it served as a plot device to speed things along. In the original series, Dr Bones McCoy would scan this – not to get too technical – doohickey that resembled a Polaroid SX-70 camera mated with one of those gizmos that spits out parking tickets and instantly diagnosed a patient’s ills. Nifty.
A real tricorder could do so much good. It could help determine whether you’re sick, help monitor vitals and share information with medical professionals.
And it would arrive 250 years ahead of the one imagined in the original Star Trek.
‘‘We were thinking of something that could be easily used in the home and was not the size of a dishwasher,’’ says Grant Campany, who oversees this competition.
The tricorder is made up of multiple components, including an iPad.
Such systems could empower patients to detect not only up to 12 conditions (including anaemia, atrial fibrillation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes) but also – and this is equally important – the absence of them.
The tricorder could play an essential role in medically underserved countries and communities. Millions of patients could relay essential information quickly to health professionals many miles away. So the challenge is to invent a device that will do all this – and weigh less than 3kg.
Harris recruited his siblings for the competition.
George, a network engineer and Gus, a urologist. Sister Julia, the only Harris sibling who didn’t study engineering at Drexel University – where their father, Harry, long taught the subject – also signed on. (A fifth sibling, Maria, decided not to participate.)
Now, four years later, after many all-nighters – or, to be honest, all-weekenders – the team has finished. Its device, DxtER, is named not after the television serial killer but is a mash-up of DX (the medical abbreviation for diagnosis), ‘‘tricorder’’ and ER.
‘‘This could have imploded at any time,’’ says Harris, a genial, calm fellow, precisely the sort of doc you want reading your vitals in the ER. ‘‘We had no delusions that we would get this far.’’
The XPrize required finalists to ship more than 65 kits to California for testing. A million dollars of the US$10m prize has been dispersed to help teams continue – a good thing for Harris’ team, whose members have personally invested US$500,000 and have been awarded US$425,000.
The winning team stands to collect US$6 million and the runner-up US$2 million. An additional US$1m will be awarded for the tricorder that most accurately charts vitals. (To make matters more complicated, if one tricorder far outperforms the other in testing, the judges might award the entire prize to one group.)
The two finalists have developed medical devices that may transform personal health care, the XPrize’s Campany says, audacity being among the competition’s goals.The global market is large enough to support both tricorders, both team leaders say, and the companies that ultimately manufacture the products stand to make millions.
During the intense design period, when the team would assemble once a month on weekends, Harris’ wife of 23 years, Angela, tested prototypes, edited documents, even served as a hand model.
She provided moral support and sustenance, though the truth is that Basil and his colleagues didn’t eat much. The team downed pots of coffee during their marathon design sessions.
‘‘Of course, Basil’s brilliant,’’ Angela says. ‘‘He’s always interested in doing something else.’’ She recalls him once musing, ‘‘Maybe I’ll apply to the space programme.’’ He was perfectly serious.
Along with the Harris siblings were Phil Charron, who describes himself as ‘‘the user-experience guy,’’ who has known Harris since school; Andy Singer, ‘‘the finance and health policy guy,’’ Harris’ buddy since kindergarten; and Ed Hepler, ‘‘the hardware guy,’’ an electrical engineer and the last to join the team, which was seriously in need of a hardware guy.
‘‘Basil’s the eternal optimist,’’ Singer says. To keep the team going, his mantra was ‘‘We’ve never been closer.’’
‘‘The great thing about this device is it’s in the patient’s hands,’’ Harris says. ‘‘You can manage your own health, get your own vital signs. It will empower you to find out if you have strep throat.’’ His device already has the capability of diagnosing 34 conditions, far more than the XPrize guidelines.
Harris recalls when they first started, back in 2013. ‘‘It was intimidating because there were all these groups being backed by large corporations,’’ he says. ‘‘But we were always thinking beyond the XPrize. We’ve met our objectives. We’ve made something worthwhile.’’ – Washington Post