4. Medical Tricorders
This is a game changer that is in the process of happening right now. In Star Trek, Dr McCoy and the later doctors could wave a device over a patient and non-invasively manage to get all manner of readings off of them. It's quick, it's cheap and very useful and would immediately interface with modern medical processes. It would be a wonderful triage tool for emergency departments. The key thing that is pushing this forward is the X Prize Foundation. You see, they've offered an prize fund of $10 million dollars for the development of a working medical tricorder. Because of this push there are now many companies working in this field and aiming to become the first to market. Of course, the X Prize has done great things before their first prize took eight years to claim. It was for suborbital spaceflight and resulted in the development of SpaceShipOne. That company has since joined forces with the Virgin Group to create Virgin Galactic so the thought of a tricorder being developed will be taken very seriously. In order to win the top prize of $7 million, the winner has to successfully detect five of thirteen conditions as well as a handful of others from a secondary list. The primary conditions include types 2 diabetes, tuberculosis, pneumonia, stroke and obstructive sleep apnoea amongst others. The secondary, elective, set includes HIV, melanoma, shingles and hypothyroidism. So from just those alone, you can see that this really isn't easy. But the results could be phenomenal. At the moment the tests for all of those are expensive and time consuming. Sure you would still have to see a specialist for most of them, but the specialist will know full well that the magic box at least thinks you have a condition. At the moment the patient would have to go through a battery of tests and wait for the results and waste more and more appointments. Plus in the field, it would be great following disaster relief and for general use in third world countries. Once that sort of technology is baselined then it will only be built on, and what the X Prize is attempting to do is to drive companies into creating a market for this.