Belgian trades EU for US to build Star Trek medical device

EU Observer ^ | 2012.03.15 @ 09:44 | Philip Ebels

[Olog-hai]

Star Trek fans will know about the Tricorder, a handheld device used by Captain Kirk and company to, among other things, scan the biological state of the living creatures they encountered on their interplanetary voyage.

Today, almost 50 years after the science-fiction series first aired on American television, the device is close to becoming a reality.

“It really is very difficult to build, but not impossible,” says Walter De Brouwer, the founder and CEO of Scanadu, a start-up company based in Sillicon Valley working with the NASA space agency to build a 21st-century Tricorder, to be put on the market by 2014.

The Tricorder, he says, will be not much more than a smartphone extension and be able to monitor and diagnose your health conditions without needing blood, urine, saliva, physical contact or even cooperation from the patient. …

But like the conferences, it seems most of the devices are either American-made or designed. And not European. De Brouwer himself, a Belgian national, recently moved to California in order to start work on the Tricorder. …

"In Europe," he says, "people are of the extreme cautionist school—they only do something if it has proven to work in the US.”

De Brouwer takes the example of the VScan handheld ultrasound device, recently presented by General Electric. “In Europe, people would say: It can’t be done. In the US they say: It will be done.”

And what about the Tricorder? Would it have been possible to build in Europe?

“No,” says De Brouwer. “First in the US, then in Europe.”

[reg45]

Why California as opposed to Texas?

[Truth29]

Obama is working on that problem, so the US can catch up to Europe.

[TalonDJ]

Proximity to a lot of other high tech industry. And compared to Europe even CA’s over regulated hell-hole is a paradise.

[MAexile]

a handheld device used by Captain Kirk

I'll have to go back and check, but I'm fairly certain that Spock and McCoy were the ones using the tricorders, not Kirk.

I can't even think of a scene where he picked one up.

[Kartographer]

"Captian according to my Tricorder readings this birth certificate is a fake."


"Bones your readings?"


"My God Jim this man is a Kenyan!"

[Free Vulcan]

'He's dead, Jim

[bunkerhill7]

I think this guy is 30 years ahead of them:

https://sites.google.com/site/wmolivadoti/

[bunkerhill7]

I think this guy is 30 years ahead of them:

https://sites.google.com/site/wmolivadoti/

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Why California as opposed to Texas?

Because of Silicon Valley, which is made possible by two nearby universities with world-class engineering schools - Stanford and UC Berkeley - and because of the relatively easy access to venture capital here. Silicon Valley is sort of a last, slowly eroding bastion of innovation and entrepreneurship in California, and even the "innovation" part is starting to become debatable.

We shouldn't take too much comfort from articles like this. In the US, as in Europe, we increasingly argue over what's already there instead of reaching for and creating what we want. There should already be a biotechnology revolution, a nanotechnology revolution - instead we stifle those fields with pre-emptive regulations and investors choose instead to fund ventures like Facebook, which is only innovative in terms of it's erosion of the concept of personal privacy.

[Whitebread]

LOL

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Olog-hai.