By Bob McDonald, Quirks & Quarks

The X-Prize people are at it again, offering $10 million to anyone who can come up with a real version of the fictional hand-held device used by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek to diagnose medical conditions without touching the body.

The X-Prize Foundation is most famous for offering a $10 million prize to the first private company to send people to the edge of space and back twice in two weeks. That was achieved by Burt Rutan's Spaceship One in 2004. It also spurred the private space race, including Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism venture which is due to start within the next few years.

The Foundation has offered other prizes for landing a robot on the moon, energy efficiency, even better oil cleanup technology. The organizers have proven that wide-open competitions with large cash prizes spur innovation in the private sector.

Their Tricorder X Prize challenge is to develop a wireless device that can, in the hands of a non-expert, accurately diagnose a set of 15 diseases. The only restrictions are that it must weigh less than 2.27 kilograms (5 pounds) and be completely safe for the user.  Such a device does not exist.

Currently, if you want to find out what's wrong with your body you have to be wired into an assortment of devices such as blood pressure monitors, X-rays, MRIs, or countless other gadgets operated by experts at a hospital or clinic. If all of these functions were incorporated into one hand held device that you simply wave over your body, you would be able to diagnose yourself at home and send your results to the doctor over the Internet. 

This challenge will take years to accomplish and in many ways is technically as difficult as developing a rocket to send people to space.

The device will need to use non-invasive techniques to monitor bodily functions from the outside. Perhaps it could sense volatile chemicals in breath, or use ultrasound, or more interestingly, some new technology that no one has thought of yet. 

That's the real goal of the competition: to foster the invention of newer and better diagnostic tools.

This is not the first time technology from the popular television series has come to life.  Captain Kirk's communicator is now the cellphone, and the huge viewscreen on the bridge of Starship Enterprise has made its way into living rooms in the form of large flat screen televisions (which are now showing reruns of Star Trek!).

The transporter that beams people from space to a planet and back again has already happened, albeit only for information, through quantum teleportation. While this is a long way from beaming an entire person from place to place, it's a start.

Now if they could just offer a prize for a faster-than-light warp drive .... Oh wait, neutrinos may have already done that.