The technology of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek looked so far forward it could almost have been used as a visual aide to Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: technology so advanced, it’s indistinguishable from magic. Despite the fictional technological magic of transporters, replicators and warp drive, Qualcomm saw enough potential in the show’s medical tricorder to challenge the world to build one . Now, the Tricorder XPrize finally has a winner in Final Frontier Medical Devices’ DxtER. The result isn’t so much an all-in-one scanner as collection of noninvasive medical-diagnosis gadgets. Even so, its creators claim the DxtER package is better than Star Trek’s fictional tricorder. That isn’t to say that DxtER does more than the show’s magical medical scanner — unlike Star Trek’s tricorder, the winning XPrize entry is actually a small collection of specialized and smart medical devices that interact with the user’s tablet. This includes a compact spirometer that can measure the strength of a patient’s lungs, a Mono test kit, medical-grade heartrate and respiration monitors, and devices like the DxtER Orb, which doubles as a thermometer and stethoscope. These devices can’t scan patients at a microscopic level like Star Trek’s device, but Basil Leaf technology co-founder George Harris says it improves on the show’s tricorder in one key area: It’s designed for patients to use themselves. “One of the things about the tricorder in the show is that it always needed a doctor to interpret the results, ” Harris told Engadget, explaining that DxtER’s companion app helps users understand the medical data DxtER collects. “Our tricorder has the doctor built-in, so it’s both the tricorder and Dr. McCoy together.” He’s not wrong, both from a practical and narrative perspective — characters on Star Trek often didn’t fully understand what a medical scan meant unless the doctor explained it to them. Likewise, the average patient can’t accurately diagnose herself even if she has access to a wealth of medical knowledge. Just ask any hypochondriac with a WebMD addiction. Giving consumers the ability to diagnose themselves at home sounds nice, but it’s bigger than that. Harris says Basil Leaf and Final Frontier Medical Devices are working to make sure every component of the DxtER tricorder kit is FDA-approved — meaning results compiled in the kit’s app could be used by doctors with no need to rerun the same tests at the hospital. “You can take those results and take them to the ER or to your physician or whoever’s helping you, and they can build off those results, ” Harris explained. “They don’t have to start back at square one — they can jump off at that point and move on with their health care.” A consumer version is still probably years away, but Harris says the group is using the $2.5 million it received from winning the XPrize competition to help fund a 500-patient clinical trial, a key step to getting the suite of gadgets approved for use in the US and putting a “Dr. McCoy” in every home that wants one. But Harris is careful to point out that the device isn’t designed to replace a visit to the doctor’s office. “We’re not trying to replace physicians, ” he says. “We’re trying to help you, the consumer, understand their health care and also help those physicians make better decisions for those consumers.”
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XPrize winner says its Tricorder is better than ‘Star Trek’
randomErr quotes a report from Quartz: In the last 10 years, researchers have developed specific sniff tests for diagnosing tuberculosis, hypertension, cystic fibrosis, and even certain types of cancer. A group of global researchers led by Hossam Haick at the Israel Institute of Technology have taken the idea a step further. They’ve built a device — a kind of breathalyzer — that is compact and can diagnose up to 17 diseases from a single breath of a patient. The breathalyzer has an array of specially created gold nanoparticles, which are sized at billionths of a meter, and mixed with similar-sized tubes of carbon. These together create a network that is able to interact differently with each of the nearly 100 volatile compounds that each person breaths out (apart from gases like nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide). Haick’s team collected 2, 800 breaths from more than 1, 400 patients who were each suffering from at least one of 17 diseases (in three classes: cancer, inflammation, and neurological disorders). Each sample of the disease was then passed through the special breathalyzer, which then produced a dataset of the types of chemicals it could detect and in roughly what quantities. The team then applied artificial intelligence to the dataset to search for patterns in the types of compounds detected and the concentrations they were detected at. As they report in the journal ACS Nano, the data from the breathalyzer could be used to accurately detect that a person is suffering from a unique disease nearly nine out of ten times. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
A new study involving more than 21, 000 people across the country finds that dementia rates in people over age 65 fell from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 8.8 percent in 2012 — a decline of 24 percent. CNN reports: The decline in dementia rates translates to about one million fewer Americans suffering from the condition, said John Haaga, director of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the new study. Dementia is a general term for a loss of memory or other mental abilities that’s severe enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s disease, which is believed to be caused by a buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain, is the most common type of dementia. Vascular dementia is the second most common type of dementia and occurs after a stroke. The study, which began in 1992, focuses on people over age 50, collecting data every two years. Researchers conduct detailed interviews with participants about their health, income, cognitive ability and life circumstances. The interviews also include physical tests, body measurements and blood and saliva samples. Although researchers can’t definitively explain why dementia rates are decreasing, Langa said doctors may be doing a better job controlling high blood pressure and diabetes, which can both boost the risk of age-related memory problems. High blood pressure and diabetes both increase the risk of strokes, which kill brain cells, increasing the risk of vascular dementia. Authors of the study found that senior citizens today are better educated than even half a generation ago. The population studied in 2012 stayed in school 13 years, while the seniors studied in 2000 had about 12 years of education, according to the study. People who are better educated may have more intellectually stimulating jobs and hobbies that help exercise their brains, Langa said. The study has been published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.