Tech Talk

Engineers at MIT say they’ve invented the smallest MOSFET transistor yet made from indium gallium arsenide. The transistor is just 22 nanometers long, according to a press release. The researchers hope this proves that such transistors will be ready to take over when Moore’s Law starts to sputter.

“We have shown that you can make extremely small indium gallium arsenide MOSFETs with excellent logic characteristics, which promises to take Moore’s Law beyond the reach of silicon,” says Jesús del Alamo, the electrical engineering and computer science professor who co-developed the transistor with graduate student Jianqian Lin and electrical engineering professor Dimitri Antoniadis. They described the work this week in San Francisco at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors recognizes indium gallium arsenide MOSFETs, in combination with germanium MOSFETs, as a potential follow-up to silicon.

IEEE Spectrum contributing editor and compound semiconductor enthusiast, Richard Stevenson, found the advance impressive, but says it leaves open the big question of whether the MIT transistors will be manufacturable. The researchers used electron beam lithography to carve the chip’s features, a technology not used in large-scale manufacturing. Chip making today uses a form of ultraviolet photolithography and may switch to an extreme ultraviolet form within the next decade. Apart from that, the issue of what the transistors are built on will also affect their manufacturability. Stevenson comments:

MIT's work is encouraging, because it shows that you can make an indium arsenide FET at small length scales that has some good characteristics. But to make it into production at the 11-nanometer node, which will follow the 16-nm node, there's loads still to do… whatever transistor is used at the 11 nm node will have to be formed on 300 mm silicon substrates, which are the industry standard. The substrate used in this work is indium phosphide, which is smaller and far more fragile than silicon. Making indium (gallium) arsenide transistors on silicon is a very challenging task.

The MIT transistors are also of the planar variety, though the industry is rapidly moving toward 3-D devices (FinFETs), Stevenson points out. At IEDM in 2009, Purdue University researchers unveiled a gallium arsenide FinFET, but its features were much chunkier than what’s reported this week.

The bottom line is that MIT’s nanotransistor is a big step forward, but there are many, many more big steps before such devices can step in for silicon.

The year is 2017. You have access to a new sensing technology, one that can see, hear, remember, and understand everything around you. It’s tiny, so it can be put something you wear or carry 24/7. What would you do with it? What would you call it? What would it replace?

This is the challenge Intel, working with Germany’s Hyve AG, set before the innovators of the world on 6 November 2012 as the “Intel Future Contest”. The contest is accepting entries online through 18 December in the form of videos, drawings, or just detailed text.

Asking people 'what would you do if you had this kind of a device' is a good way to uncover insights about desires, fears, challenges related to a particular technology," says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future and one of the members of the contest's jury. "The Internet allows us to quickly access such insights from thousands of people around the world. In this sense, the Internet is a giant sensing engine of its own. I think the process is a valuable way for shaping technology development, including masses of people in thinking about possible futures and participating in the design process."

More than 200 ideas have been submitted so far. A fair number, not surprisingly, are for some kind of wearable virtual assistant, activity tracking, or memory capture gizmo. But that’s not all people are thinking about. A few examples:

—The Gardener. Instead of giving the sensing device to a person, this innovator puts it in the garden, where it takes control, monitoring temperature, humidity, and other conditions, and taking note of what plants are supposed to b there and what aren’t (weeds). The entrant thinks such a device will make gardening accessible to people who don’t have time every day or week to take care of their gardens.

—Skin Energy/Mini Wind Turbine. One innovator sees an opportunity for 100 gm wind turbines that sense and respond to minor wind movements as well as gusts for use in charging of mobile devices (say, while you’re riding your bike) as well as for stationary lighting.

—Smart Parking. This complex system for vehicles sharing a common secure parking area—a garage under an apartment building, say—tracks vehicles coming and going and directs them to available parking spaces, possibly by relocating a robotic pathway.

Entries will be evaluated by experts and voted on by the online community; a jury will make the final determination of winners, to be notified in January. Prizes of cash (for the first three finishers; $5000, $2500, and $1500 respectively) and products or vouchers (for the next seven finishers) are being provided by Hyve.

Updated 12/12/12.

Last week, Bitcoin-Central, a Bitcoin exchange and storage service provided by the French company, Paymium, made a huge announcement. In essence, they said that they will now legally be able to carry out all of the functions of a payment service provider (such as Paypal or Dwolla)—with "legally" being the key word here. The truth is that it looks like a bank and it talks like a bank. But it's not really a bank.

But that's okay. For the moment, let's just talk about appearances. Because in this case they are very important.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that was built to operate completely outside the influence of governments and financial institutions. Bitcoins, the unit of currency, are created, transferred and secured exclusively by the people who run Bitcoin software.

By offering regulated banking services, Bitcoin-Central has torn a little hole into the fabric of the international financial system, a hole through which Bitcoins can now legitimately flow and mingle with national currencies. Each Bitcoin-Central account will now be given an international bank account number which will allow customers to make and receive transfers with other banks. If they want to, customers can use this number to set up direct deposits with their employers and request that whatever currency coming in be converted immediately to Bitcoin. It also means that Bitcoin-Central will be able to begin issuing debit cards that withdraw from balances maintained in either Euros or Bitcoins. Futhermore, any balances kept as Euros will be insured by the taxpayers, just as they would at any other bank. The only thing Bitcoin-Central will not be able to do is invest its clients money and issue credit.

If this little fissure grows larger, it is very likely to lure in new Bitcoin investors, the kinds that have been watching from the sidelines waiting for someone to iron out all of the wrinkles. Bitcoin's legal status may be the biggest wrinkle of all, in that no one knows exactly how the courts will define it. This uncertainty has caused some companies to back away from their associations with Bitcoin. Last year, Mt. Gox, the largest online Bitcoin exchange, was temporarily unable to accept Euro deposits when the Bank de France, fearing that the exchange was operating outside European regulations, suspended its account with Mt. Gox.

According to Bitcoin-Central (rather, a user named "davout" who claims to speak for the company on the Bitcoin forum), Mt. Gox's snafu in France was the reason they decided to sort out their legal status.

According to Davout:

"Since 2010 we kept learning, when mtgox got kicked out of France for not complying with the law we learnt from it, when our banks gave us a hard time we learnt from it, when we discussed with smart people on these very forums we learnt from it."

But, like I said, this does not mean that Bitcoin-Central is a bank. It's not even a payment service provider (PSP). In fact, what they have done is partner with an outside bank called Credit Mutuel Arkéa and a registered PSP called Aqoba, both of which operate out of France. Aqoba will operate a third-party payment account for Bitcoin-Central which will facilitate Bitcoin transactions through the account. The relationship with Credit Mutuel Arkea will provide insurance to all Euro funds. So Bitcoin-Central itself has not gained any new legal status, but it has made some important new friends.

For three decades, Rick Smolan—a former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer—has taken global cultural snapshots through his Day in the Life series of coffee table books that explore a time capsule of activity involving a country, discipline, or issue.

The projects—produced by the New York-based Against All Odds Productions—which Smolan runs with wife and co-author, Jennifer Erwitt, and COO Katya Able, take around 18 months and involve upwards of 200 writers and photographers around the globe.

Their latest book, The Human Face of Big Data, out this week, takes a more encompassing approach to a topic than its predecessors. Tackling the idea of Big Data—mankind’s ability to collect, analyze, and act on an unprecedented amount of information in real time—the book uses photos, essays, and articles (including one by yours truly) to examine the phenomenon, and how individuals and companies are harnessing it for human benefit, while raising concerns about data ownership and privacy invasion.

“Having now spent a year looking closely at this emerging world of big data, I hope the book will spark a global conversation about both the tremendous potential good and the concerns we all need to have about who owns data that you and I generate,” says Smolan. "Right now it's primarily companies and governments who are thinking about the uses of Big Data. It's really important that each of us also thinks about how this is going to affect our lives."  

The project employs Big Data as a storytelling device and business platform. In the two months leading up to the book’s release, the Against All Odds team organized a three-city technology networking event and unveiled a website to gather digital behavior data from 300 000-plus anonymous volunteers. The results will be available free to researchers and academics next year. The project is self-published from sponsorship by several technology companies, primarily EMC², along with Cisco Systems, VMWare, Tableau Software, Originate, plus FedEx. It’s the first coffee table book to use the Aurasma mobile app, which triggers related multimedia when readers hold smartphone and tablet cameras to yellow key graphics on its pages. There’s also an iPad app, with profits going to charity: water.

Hopeful But Wary

The book is a hopeful look at Big Data, highlighting its impact on agricultural efficiency, weather and earthquake prediction, fertility and genome mapping, space junk, crime solving, eradicating disease, and tracking endangered species, to name a few.

In one particularly striking example, The Artificial Retina—looking like something straight out of Star Trek—Weill Cornell Medical College’s Sheila Nirenberg used Big Data to circumvent certain types of blindness, such as that caused by damaged retinal photoreceptor cells. Her team employs high-speed, parallel processing to embed custom software into microprocessors and cameras to be built into eyeglasses. The camera images are translated into code (in the form of flashing lights) that can be transmitted by still healthy ganglion cells and understood by the brain.

But with hope comes concern. That's Smolan's take on J. Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics in La Jolla, Calif., which also relies on massive computer processing, to create genetic sequencing for new types of bacteria, algae, and plants to assist in industry and replace fossil fuels. “He is patenting new forms of life,” says Smolan. “While these new forms are being designed for human good, it does make you think of unintended consequences, like Frankenstein.”

Photo credits: Baby: ©Catherine Balet “Strangers in the light” (Steidl) 2012 / from The Human Face of Big Data; Artificial Retina: ©Joe McNally 2012 / from The Human Face of Big Data

OLED TVs, hitting store shelves in giant screen sizes, are likely to draw more consumer eyes than wallets in 2013, due to their cost of about US $10 000 for a 55-inch diagonal unit. That's a consumer problem. Manufacturers have another concern: potential shortages. Like LCD TVs, they rely on indium, a material in high demand for solar panels as well as displays. In OLEDs, indium is part of the indium tin oxide (ITO) used as the anode. The oxide is both conductive and transparent, making it perfect for displays.

But because of indium’s growing cost and limited availability—and because it is brittle, and therefore not suitable for future flexible displays—researchers have for years sought a viable substitute. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University's Microelectronics Research Center recently announced that they may have found that particular holy grail—in the 15-year-old polymer poly (3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene):poly (styrene sulfonate), aka PEDOT:PSS. Previously, PEDOT:PSS wasn’t conductive enough or transparent enough to work in displays; it’s more commonly been used for coating photographic films to prevent static discharge. But Ames senior scientists Joseph Shinar and Ruth Shinar, and research scientist Min Cai, and their colleagues have developed a multilayer PEDOT:PSS fabrication technique that, with other manufacturing tricks, improved both conductivity and transparency. The research was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

University of Cincinnati associate professor Jason Heikenfeld, considering the researchers results, said that Ames’ version of PEDOT:PSS is not superior to the best ITO in performance as a basic transparent conductor. But, he indicated, the results are good for PEDOT:PSS. Joseph Shinar agrees, but notes that in spite of the lower transparency and lower conductivity of the multilayer PEDOT:PSS compared with indium tin oxide, the PEDOT:PSS-based devices are more efficient than the indium-tin-oxide-based devices because of a favorable micro optical cavity effect.

PEDOT:PSS isn’t the only technology taking aim at indium tin oxide’s dominance of OLED electrodes. Another leading competitor, Heikenfeld says, has been silver nanowire ink, being commercialized as ClearOhm. Heikenfeld pointed out that ClearOhm has shown amazing transparency, but the semiconductor community has a deep understanding of how to work with PEDOT:PSS, and PEDOT:PSS  has some unique current-injection properties that are desirable for OLEDs . But he’s not convinced that anything yet appears to be the ultimate ITO alternative. 

Paul O’Donovan, principal research analyst in Gartner’s Semiconductor Research Group, is more excited. “This is a significant advance in the commercial development of OLEDs,” he told Spectrum. “Not only does PEDOT:PSS offer an over 40 percent efficient improvement over indium tin oxide, but it’s flexible, opening up the real proposition of a range of flexible displays for pocket-sized to projection-screen-sized displays. And the added bonus is that PEDOT:PSS is lower cost and not in short supply. This development will help with reducing the manufacturing costs of large OLED TV panels, which is good news for consumers.”

Image: PEDOT:PSS. Source: Wikimedia Commons

NORUSCA II is the mother of all fisheye whole-sky cameras. The device can rapidly tune through the spectrum from 430 nm to 750 nm, using a 3.5 mm focal length, f/1.1 lens with a 180-degree field of view, to capture images on a high-resolution Princeton Instruments electron multiplying charge coupled device (EMCCD) camera.

Fred Sigernes of the University Centre on Svalbard (with collaborators from the Ukraine National Academy of Sciences, the Murmansk Region Polar Geophysical Institute, and Calgary’s Keo Scientific) built NORUSCA II to study auroras at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory. The observatory is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, at 78º N (where the sun sets for the winter before Halloween and doesn’t appear again until Valentine’s Day). The results are described in a new, open-access Optics Express paper.

NORUSCA II all-sky camera, with 12 optical elements, rather than the 19 of a standard auroral telescope: 1) focusing and collimation, 2) filter box, 3) camera lens, 4) camera body.

The camera’s hyperspectral heart is a filter box—an array of electronically controlled wave plates. These tunable Lyot filters—a series of successively thinner liquid crystal screens whose optical properties vary with the voltage across them—can switch from one wavelength to another in about one second.

Sigernes set NORUSCA II up under a clear observatory dome at the Spitsbergen observatory on 7 November 2011, to watch the sky during the nearly four-month-long night.

Over that period, the camera captured one full spectral scan a minute--cycling through 15 wavelengths (set to 13 key nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sodium transitions plus two background control settings) with time for a half-minute nap in between cycles--to produce stunning time-lapse videos of the Northern Lights...and the northern sky, generally.

Back on 24 January 2012, NORUSCA II caught the earthly aftereffects of a storm on the Sun, a strong coronal mass ejection of particles blasted out of an M8.7-force solar flare. While the flare was not big enough to make an historic Top-Ten list, it was impressive enough to generate NASA press releases and prompt space-weather storm warnings from IEEE Spectrum, among others..

The result was a mesmerizing video of the aurora borealis undulating in the solar wind—followed by a phenomenon that had never been documented before: glowing ripples running across the heavens, for all the world as though someone had dropped a pebble into the pond of the sky. (The red arrow in the photo at left indicates the ripples; the blue arrow shows faint emissions from the Milky Way.) Sigernes says he is still analyzing the ripple spectrum (which also appeared on the observatory’s near-infrared hydroxide imager), so we will have to wait to see what all of the (electron) excitement was about.

Images: Optics Express / Fred Sigernes

Since 2010, Stanford University has annually selected engineering heroes, engineers with some Stanford affiliation who have “advanced the course of human, social, and economic progress through engineering.”

This year’s class of engineering heroes numbers seven. (The first class included HP founders William Hewlett and David Packard.) They are:

—Computer scientist and entrepreneur James H. Clark: While an associate professor, Clark developed the Geometry Engine, a processor optimized for rendering computer graphics, and used that technology to kick off his first startup, Silicon Graphics. He went on to found Netscape with Marc Andreessen. And for years he a lot of time commissioning and sailing extremely high tech yachts, though he's gotten over that interest and this year put the yachts on the market.

—Yahoo Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang. The two hold masters degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford, and jointly founded Yahoo in 1995 to commercialize what had previously been called “Jerry and Dave’s guide to the World Wide Web.”

—Public key cryptography inventor Martin Hellman. Along with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, Hellman developed public key cryptography. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford, and served on the faculty for 25 years. While at Stanford he was honored several times for his efforts to overcome ethnic tension at the university. Lately IEEE Fellow Hellman has been concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons.

—AI pioneer John McCarthy. Stanford computer science professor John McCarthy, who died late last year, coined the term “artificial intelligence,” developed the LISP language, and invented computer time-sharing.

—Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry has B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford in mathematics, and is currently a professor emeritus in the school's Department of Management Science and Engineering. He served as U.S. secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, and undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in the 1970s.

—“Father of Earthquake Engineering John Blume. Blume was a consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and a Stanford alum. His advances in seismic engineering contributed to the design of the Stanford Linear Accelerator and the California State Capitol; he also consulted for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and on 70 nuclear plant projects. Blume died in 2002.

Who are your engineering heroes? (Your choices do not, of course, have to have a Stanford connection.) Tell us in the comments below.

One of the scariest aspects of Hurricane Sandy was that it wasn't really a freak event. The storm surges produced in Lower Manhattan actually were predictable based on historical data and climate modeling, so you could argue that maybe we should have been a bit better prepared for this type of storm.

But what about storms that are truly unprecedented?

This week, researchers discussed their work on so-called "black swan" cyclones at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Black swans, said Ning Lin, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, are storms that cannot be predicted based on historical data, and they can have dire consequences. Such storms actually have "retrospective predictability," which means that we can only explain why they happened, after they happened.

You might wonder how it's even possible to study such storms. Lin, whose study at AGU this week was co-authored by hurricane research eminence Kerry Emanuel of MIT, said that predicting these anomalous storms just requires a different approach. While the bulk of tropical cyclone risk assessments are based on historical data, she relied on synthetic models instead. "We can generate large numbers of synthetic storms, and physically possible storms for different climate conditions, and then carry out storm surge simulations," she said during a press conference. So far, they have only modeled a few specific locations, largely because the computational requirements for each run are huge.

In the U.S., the team chose to study Tampa, Florida. Lin said the highest recorded storm surge in Tampa was due to a storm in the 19th century, when waters rose 4.6 meters. But that doesn't mean a new storm couldn't go higher. "Ten meters is possible," she said. She added that the record 3.5 meter storm surge Sandy sent to New York was several meters off from what a black swan would produce. "In terms of storm surge, Sandy was not a black swan." Lin's team also analyzed the possibility for black swan storms that could inundate Darwin, Australia, and, amazingly enough, parts of the Persian Gulf like Doha, Qatar (where, incidentally, somewhat punchless climate talks are ongoing this week).

One of the lessons that emerged out of Sandy's receding waters was the idea that this type of storm is likely to happen again as seas rise and weather patterns shift thanks to climate change. In that context, black swans are still a fringe concern: Lin said the 10-meter storm surge in Tampa, or a 5 or 6 meter surge in New York, are probably around a one-in-ten-thousand event. But the fact that Sandy and its spiraling-into-the-billions cost doesn't even qualify for black swan status is terrifying: there are super-rare superstorms out there that could double Sandy's devastation, but Sandy-like storms are probably on their way again before long.

Image via Maryland National Guard

The satellite giveth, and the satellite taketh away. While some space-borne probes seem to confirm that earthly ice caps are shrinking, others indicate that billion-year-old ice deposits lurk in Mercury’s deep arctic shadows—which remain at a cool -173 °C despite the planet’s proximity to the sun, which can drive summer noon temperatures up to 627 °C.

Are Mercurians swiping Earth’s ice to chill their martinis? Hardly. For one thing, it’s too hard to get good vermouth up there. More important, it appears that the ice (and possibly some organic matter, which may serve as insulation, like sawdust in an old icehouse) was delivered by accommodating comets.

Two instrument packages on the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging spacecraft (Messenger) provide complementary evidence confirming that the deep eternal shadows of the planet’s steep-walled polar craters harbor massive plates of ice.

Two Science papers--describing Messenger’s Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) and Neutron Spectrometer (NS) experiments—provide the up-close confirmation that, yes, those really are caves of ice in that sunniest of pleasure domes.

The MLA, built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, lights up the Mercurial surface with a 1064-nanometer (deep infrared) chromium/neodymium yttrium-aluminum garnet laser. Like orbiting laser altimeters everywhere, it flashes light off the ground below (in this case, lighting up spots about 50 meters in diameter at 400-meter intervals) and gauges distance by measuring the time until the reflected light returns. The MLA gathers additional information about the surface by alternating high- and low-power flashes. By comparing the strengths of the returning signals, it can provide more accurate estimates of the reflectance of the ground below, possibly revealing something about the surface's composition.

The result is a topographic map of Mercury based on more than 4 million individual elevation measurements—half of them including information on the nature of the ground.

The Messenger researchers were already primed to look for ice. Earth-based radar probes had previously indicated that the craters might hide deposits of frozen water—or some other captured volatile substance such as sulfur—in radar-bright areas hidden deep in the perpetual shadows of arctic craters.

The scientists found that these radar-bright areas fall into two categories. Those at the highest latitudes—where the crater-wall shadows are longest and the valleys coldest—reflect both radar and 1064-nm laser light strongly. These, the team says, are consistent with large areas of exposed ice, in layers at least several meters thick.

In slightly lower latitudes, the researchers found that the radar bright areas are often enveloped or overlaid by larger laser-altimeter-dark regions (areas that reflect little infrared). Indeed, “all craters with [radar bright] deposits and sufficient altimeter sampling show at least some [laser-altimeter dark] features in their poleward facing portions.” This suggests, say the researchers, that in these warmer craters, a thin layer of something—regolith or even comet-deposited organic compounds—may shield deeper strata of ice, protecting them from sublimation.

The altimeter findings are supported by the Johns Hopkins–built Neutron Spectrometer, which detects neutrons thrown off of atoms on Mercury’s surface as the atoms are struck by gamma rays. The emitted neutrons fall into three energy ranges: fast (energy greater than 0.5 megaelectron volt), epithermal (0.5 electron volt to 0.5 MeV), and thermal (less than 0.5 eV).  Because hydrogen atoms and neutrons have such similar masses, they transfer momentum very efficiently, and the hydrogen absorbs momentum from the epithermal neutrons.

The neutron spectrometer counts the number of incoming fast, epithermal, and thermal neutrons (correcting for changes in altitude) and extrapolates the data to infer the amount of hydrogen in the surface materials. The relative proportion of epithermal neutrons among the outbound particles reveals the amount of hydrogen present. A drop of even 4 percent in the rate of incoming fast and epithermal neutrons indicates that the spacecraft is passing over hydrogen rich water.  

The neutron data suggest that only half of the radar-bright regions are actually water at the surface. At the same time, the overall picture shows as much as 1000 cubic kilometers of water icebound at Mercury's poles, lying in layers “tens of centimeters thick.” Many of these layers are insulated below a superficial covering (much poorer in hydrogen compounds) 10 to 20 centimeters deep.

Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo Observatory. 

Walter De Brouwer wants to get inside your medicine cabinet. According to the founder and CEO of the medical startup Scanadu, there’s a big market opportunity in there.

“When you look at the numbers, the only medical tool for at-home use that really sells is the thermometer,” he told me in a recent phone interview. So Scanadu has designed what is essentially a super-smart thermometer. The Scanadu Scout, expected to hit market in late 2013 and sell for less than US $150, allows a user to quickly measure six physiological parameters—temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygenation, blood pressure, heart rate, and electrical heart activity—and send all that info to a smartphone via Bluetooth.

“These parameters are called the vital signs, and they test them in every emergency room in the world,” explains De Brouwer. “You have a complete emergency room in your smart phone.” The Scout takes all these readings with one small sensor-studded device that the user holds against his temple for about 10 seconds. 

Scanadu announced the Scout on Thursday, and says it's now ready for manufacturing. The Scout is the latest device to seek customers in the “quantified self” movement: the growing tribe of fitness enthusiasts, dieters, and data geeks who use clip-on devices to track things like exercise and sleep. All these quantified self tools send info to a website or a smartphone, where the consumer can analyze the data over time and measure progress towards his or her goals.

De Brouwer says the Scout will be used in a similar way, and says the data produced will be “meaningful and actionable.” It can change consumers’ conversations with their doctors, he says. “With our device, it takes 10 seconds to diagnose yourself, and you have all these parameters,” he told me. “After a couple of months, you have all this data about yourself, and you can do analytics. Then you can take the data to your doctor and say, ‘This is my average blood pressure. But here I can see it going wrong, because I started taking this new medicine, or I started sleeping less.’”  

His use of the word “diagnose” there was a bit of a slip-up, because officially, the Scout is not a medical device, and it’s not meant to be used for diagnosis. That would require a type of FDA approval that Scanadu wants nothing to do with. So later in our conversation, De Brouwer stressed that the Scout isn’t actually a medical device; it’s an educational device. “We do not provide a diagnosis, we are just opening up that diagnostic space to consumers, so they can try it out themselves,” he says. In other words, the Scout won’t tell you if there’s something wrong with you, and it won’t suggest any remedies. It will simply tell you that your temperature is 103 degrees and your respiratory rate is high, and leave it to you to figure out if such readings are a sign of trouble.

The Scout is the company’s first step. Scanadu also plans to sell several add-ons for fluid analysis: One disposable cartridge will allow for urine analysis; another will test saliva for the flu virus. The company will also compete for the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, a $10 million award to whoever can build a device that resembles the Tricorder used in Star Trek’s medical clinic. To win the prize, the device must be able to measure key health metrics and diagnose a set of 15 diseases. De Brouwer thinks the Scout will be a good step in that direction. “We’re building this Tricorder from the bottom up,” he says.  

For more on Scanadu's vision of the future, check out their aspirational video below.