No Stupid Questions

Am actual doctor. I think we're both closer to and further away from a Tricorder than you think.

Point of care ultrasound has been booming for the last 1-2 decades. There are now cell-phone sized wireless probes you can easily put in your pocket and do multiple diagnostic scans on the heart, lung, belly, etc with the caveat that you have to be adept at both obtaining and interpreting ultrasound images which certainly takes a lot of process.

There are devices about as big as 2-3 cell phones (think label maker or portable speaker sized) which can reliably run a whole panel of common blood tests including electrolytes, a blood gas, and hemoglobin on a 1-2mL blood sample in <5min. We also have dedicated point of care A1C devices, PT/INR devices, and probably some more I don't know about.

I don't think we'll ever have handheld xray/CT solely due to the significant radiation risk the operator would experience, even if the technology could be miniaturized.

I don't think handheld MRI will ever happen either. The power requirement alone for the magnet strength needed is immense, not to mention the dangers of the magnetic field in some random unsecured area and the length of normal scans makes a handheld device impractical.

I don't think we'll ever have "bloodless" comprehensive blood testing. There's only so much you can do with spectroscopy, and some things like electrolytes are in dramatically different concentrations between the cells and the blood so scanning through skin would likely dramatically alter readings.

TLDR we are actively miniaturizing some medical technologies. There are physics limitations in "handheld-izing " most non-ultrasound diagnostic imaging, and while we've certainly made great progress in point of care labs, I don't think we're going to get a device that can measure those things without a blood sample.

Just in case there is someone on this site who isn’t a Trekkie somehow

Thank you for the explaination, I am the one and only Lemmy user who hasn't seen Star Trek :P

Smartwatches today can check blood oxygen level, blood pressure, and heart rate just by aiming a light at the wrist.

Dogs can smell certain diseases. I don't the state of the tech but scent detectors for airport security are being developed. I see no reason these couldn't be used in a medical setting.

Some of the CAT line of phones have an infrared camera.

I don't know when, but it seems possible eventually.

Will smaller medical diagnostics be developed? Yes.

Will we see a fully realized tricorder in our lifetime? Probably not.

As far as I'm aware there's not really a feasible path to miniaturization for most of the current medical scanning technologies. Physics and materials science are fundamental barriers.

The thing is most of the medical scans can't be miniaturized like that. There are hard physical limitations on what say, magnetic resonance can do and from how far away. And then you're trying to put all different types of tech into a single super small box. They do radical different stuff that requires completely separate hardware.

IMO, it's not physically possible to miniaturise single high resolution scanner let alone bunch of them in a single package

What about a dermal regenerator...

Not plausible at all is the answer.

Also fixing everything with a tiny prick that doesn't even sting. They changed that a bit on Strange New Worlds though, patients wince.

It's science fiction, it's the future, here's a knife that toasts bread while you slice it!

There was an x prize for a tricorder about a decade back; they found that to accomplish all the tasks, they actually needed three sets of hardware, two of which needed to be strapped on to the person.

Dunno if youve heard of it, but a number of years ago, there was a company called Theranos, a scam that claimed they could test for all manner of diseases in a short time with just a drop of your blood.

Note that i said "scam" because its obviously BS. Im not familiar with the exact medical capabilities of the tricorder (only ever watched a handful of episodes) but i feel like real next-level medical analysis would come via nano-robots in the bloodstream, not some external device. Then again, its been a couple of years since i heard of advancements in the nano-robot category too.

Tricorder was able to tell if someone was pregnant...c'mon now.

If you're asking how feasible is a handheld device with a shitton of sensors? Fairly doable. Providing sustainable energy to something like that with current tech...not so much.