Hospital installs tricorder-like health-analysis facility

The equipment, developed by researchers from Leicester University, uses an array of advanced technology that draws from space and pollution research to provide information about a patient’s condition without invasive and time-consuming tests.

A team at Leicester Royal Infirmary will next month begin testing the equipment to see how well it could help rapidly diagnose a range of conditions, from sepsis, to cancer, to drug overdoses.

The project is a collaboration between members of the university’s chemistry and emergency medicine departments and space research centre, who wanted to create something that performed a similar function to the Star Trek ‘tricorder’ scanner.

The aim is to be able to build up a picture of what is wrong with a patient much sooner in the diagnosis period and with more information, said Leicester’s professor of emergency medicine Tim Coats.

‘We’re trying to replace some of the things that are unpleasant and invasive at the moment, that involve sticking needles into people, with measurements that don’t need those unpleasant, painful procedures,’ he told The Engineer.