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Do you remember that Tricorder from Star Trek that Dr.McCoy, Spock and other Federation explorers used to analyze both the health of patients in sickbay and the atmosphere on alien planets?

Researchers at Stanford University have been developing this Tricorder like technology that could detect bombs and even tumors.

Others have also attempted to re-create the Tricorder. The Scanadu Scout was an attempt to put "an emergency room in the palm of your hand," said one of its founders. The Scanadu team is a competitor in an XPrize competition to build a tricorder equivalent that was first announced in 2012, with winners to be announced in January 2016.

For the Stanford researchers, the impetus came from DARPA, the US' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA was looking for technology that could find buried IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that can't be spotted with metal detectors.

"What makes the tricorder the holy grail of detection devices is that the instrument never touches the subject," Assistant Professor Amin Arbabian, lead on the Stanford project, said in a statement. "All the measurements are made through the air, and that's where we've made the biggest strides."

Their work was published in the journal Applied Physics Letters in February, and presented in October at the International Ultrasonics Symposium in Taipei.

Aside from detecting bombs, the Stanford Researchers think that the Tricorder could also detect tumors.

"We think we could develop instrumentation sufficiently sensitive to disclose the presence of tumors, and perhaps other health anomalies, much earlier than current detection systems, nonintrusively and with a handheld portable device," Arbabian said.

The researcher's other lead, Research Professor Pierre Khuri-Yakub, suggested that the technology could even become practical and widely available within the next 15 years.

Spock would surely be impressed by this.