The X Prize Foundation, not content with its endeavors into cheaper space transport and speedier decoding of the human genome, has announced a $10 million prize fund for the first person or team to invent a medical diagnosis tricorder.

A tricorder, if you’re not up to speed with sci-fi in general and Star Trek in particular, is a hand-held “omniscanner” that can analyse your environment, record data, or quickly diagnose medical maladies. The Tricorder X Prize challenge is only interested in medical diagnosis, though, and to claim the $10 million prize, entrants will have to create a tricorder that brings “understandable, easily accessible health information and metrics to consumers on their mobile devices, pointing them to earlier actions for care.” The X Prize tricorder would be ideal for diagnosis in remote locations, or in countries where advanced medical care is hard to come by.

In the same way that Google sponsors the Lunar X Prize, the Tricorder X Prize $10 million prize fund is being provided by Qualcomm, which just happens to be the largest fabless computer chip supplier in the world, with a speciality in wireless communications. The winner of the Tricorder X Prize will probably take the form of a customized handset and smartphone app — and given Qualcomm provides the system-on-a-chip (SoC) packages for many of today’s smartphones, it’s easy to see why the company would be interested in sponsoring the creation of a tricorder.

The main challenge of the Tricorder X Prize is sussing out how to leverage existing and upcoming smartphone hardware. Medical imaging using a built-in camera, like the recent use of smartphone apps to diagnose strokes, would be one way; measuring ultrasound and other waveforms using the device’s wireless sensors would be another. There’s no doubting the processing power of modern smartphones, so for the most part this X Prize it will simply come down to ingenious use of existing sensors, and perhaps tacking on a few more. It would be easy enough to attach a blood or urine analysis “accessory” via Bluetooth or USB, for example.

The competition is expected to launch in early 2012, which means our children could be “playing doctor” with incredible and informative accuracy by 2013. Better yet, though, now that the X Prize Foundation has exposed its love of Star Trek, we can only hope that the next Prize will focus on an even better technology: teleportation.

Read more at Popular Science