Tricorder

A tricorder is a handheld instrument in Star Trek. A crew member points it at something and reads what it finds, and it records the readings. The name reflects three jobs, sensing, recording and computing. The prop was designed and built under contract by Wah Ming Chang and first appeared in "The Man Trap", the first episode of the original series to be broadcast, in 1966.^[1] Real inventors, and one prize competition, have since aimed at building one.

The standard model is for scouting and for recording data. Variants include a medical model with a detachable high-resolution scanner and an engineering model for work on a starship. In The Next Generation the tricorder was at first modeled on a real object, the HP-41C calculator.^[1]

In 1996 a company called Vital Technologies sold the TR-107, a toy-like handheld with an electromagnetic-field meter, a weather station and a light meter. QuantuMDx, founded in 2008, set out to build a handheld DNA laboratory that would give a diagnosis in under 15 minutes. A tricorder app for Android phones was withdrawn in 2011 after a copyright notice from CBS, and in May 2022 a small cell analyzer called rHEALTH ONE, built for NASA, was tested on the International Space Station.^[1]

The largest effort was the Tricorder XPRIZE, announced on May 10, 2011 by the X Prize Foundation and Qualcomm with a prize of $10 million, and opened at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 12, 2012. The device had to diagnose patients as accurately as a panel of physicians, across 13 core conditions that included diabetes and pneumonia, and to measure five vital signs, among them blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory rate.^[1][2] The competition ended in 2017. Final Frontier Medical Devices, of Paoli, Pennsylvania, won with a device called DxtER, and the award was announced in April of that year. Dynamical Biomarkers Group, of Taiwan, placed second.^[2][3] Early entrants had included Scanadu and Senstore.^[1]

The draft of Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl, the quiz dungeon that Molecular Reality Corporation uses to explain its science, names the tricorder twice. In a passage on stamping out solid-state pores with semiconductor methods and joining them to amplifiers and logic on a chip, the draft says: "This is how we get molecular sensing into every toaster, every toilet, every tricorder."^[4] The company calls the goal utility-scale molecular sensing.

The word returns in a section headed "Other Sensing Modalities (Speculative & Advanced R&D for Future MRx Platforms)", which says that the company's long-term roadmap includes "even more exotic sensing modalities, transforming future MRx devices into true 'tricorders' for the molecular realm." It names six, among them nanopore force spectroscopy, which would measure the forces needed to unfold a protein, and the coupling of a nanopore's output to a mass spectrometer; the others are thermal, magnetic, electrochemical and acoustic sensing.^[4] Elsewhere on the page the dungeon's guide, Keltar, comments on the plans, and a list of links includes a news item of November 2024 headlined "'Tricorder' Tech: Ultra-Small Spectrometer Yields the Power of a Device 1000 Times Larger", about a spectrometer from Delft University of Technology. A note beneath it says: "This mirrors our core hardware vision for MRx devices".^[4]

The Golden Question asks how to build a simple, cheap, compact solid-state nanopore device that needs no target-specific reagents and reports on everything it sees. A quest on the company's board once invited members to discuss an "analytical universal single device", which has an article of its own, Analytically universal single device.^[5]

• Utility-scale molecular sensing
• MinION
• MR series
• The Disclosure Crawl
• Ideas and influences of Molecular Reality Corporation
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation