Scanadu Tricorder: Check Your Health as Often As Your Email

Star Trek fans? Good news. The tricorder will be in everyone's life now. Medical tech startup Scanadu has created a scanner that can take vitals such as blood pressure, pulmonary function, and temperature, and sends them to your smartphone.

This device can be the difference between a needed trip to the emergency room or a waste of time and money for conditions that don’t need treatment. The company has just raised $2 million in funding from a group of investors considering that it is not even one year old.


The team is lead by visionary Walter De Brouwer, the Belgian futurist who co-founded Starlab in 1996 with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. He first got the idea for the Tricorder while at Starlab but the technology wasn’t mature enough at the time. In 2006 his son was in a serious accident and hospitalized for three months. De Brouwer again got to thinking about leveraging technology to empower people by allowing them to auto-diagnose and make informed decisions concerning health.
We also recommend watching: "Revolutionary Diabetics: Testing Your Blood Sugar with Your iPhone" and "Eric Topol: The Wireless Future of Medicine".

Scanadu: The Medical Tricorder is Here

Walter De Brouwer is a Belgian internet and technology entrepreneur, futurist and semiotician. He earned a Masters degree in linguistics from the University of Ghent in 1980 and a PhD in Semiotics from Tilburg University in 2005. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence with the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 2004. He sits on the editorial advisory board of the Journal for Chinese Entrepreneurship.