Tiny chips can turn smartphones into tricorders

[rhoenix]

Back in the early days of comic books, before they were used to convey compelling, mature narratives, you could turn to the back page and order X-ray specs for a few bucks. They obviously didn’t allow you to see through walls, but Caltech researchers have developed a tiny new terahertz chip that could give your smartphone that ability.

The terahertz frequency sits between 0.3 to 3 terahertz, tuckered into the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and far infrared. A large reason why terahertz waves can be considered special is because they can provide a similar function as X-rays, but whereas X-rays can be dangerous, terahertz radiation is comparatively harmless. Though the terahertz frequency has been utilized through a small device on a couple occasions, one reason why we haven’t switched over to T-rays from X-rays is because terahertz frequency equipment is generally large and expensive. Now, though, a team of Caltech researchers has managed to eliminate both of those issues.

The chip is made of of silicon, smaller than a penny, and operates thanks to a group of small transistors that work together to act as a terahertz antenna. The chip is small enough that it could fit inside a device the size of a modern-day smartphone. Due to the types of objects terahertz waves can and cannot pass through, an app could theoretically be made that can read which objects the waves passed through and which objects bounced them back. With this information, the data could be visually recreated on a standard display, turning your phone into what is essentially a portable X-ray device (in the specs sense). The Caltech researchers feel that the buck doesn’t have to stop at detecting a gun inside a purse, but the sensors could also scan for cancer without an invasive procedure, make motion control recognition more precise, and increase data transfer speeds — something we admittedly hear on a regular basis at this point.

This specific Caltech chip has been in development for a while, but as we seem to be petering on the edge of not really knowing where to go with our mobile device hardware lately, perhaps adding T-ray technology — a new kind of sensor, so to speak, to go along with our gyroscope and accelerometer and GPS — would be the next step in advancing the hardware. Perhaps doctors wouldn’t immediately be diagnosing patients by waving a smartphone in front of them after minimizing Angry Birds, but it’s certainly feasible that bouncers or sporting event security guards could add a smartphone T-ray scanner to their repertoire of security devices.

Of course, the biggest worry about this kind of widespread technology would be privacy concerns, as any old person with a T-ray-equipped smartphone could snap a photo of what’s hiding underneath our clothes. That, however, is the kind of world in which we live nowadays, as Google’s Glass continues to raise privacy concerns before the consumer market even tries the thing out. Like with Glass though, and even camera phones before it, the public will have to decide whether or not the benefits outweigh the potential privacy breach. There isn’t any word on the chip’s integration into consumer-level hardware, so maybe we’ll have figured all this privacy stuff out with Glass by then.

Though this does have privacy concerns added to it, to me it signifies that the "smartphone" paradigm is not only turning into a full-fledged computing platform, but it's portability allows for great advances of awareness of one's environment. This could lead to adding a simple attachment to an iPhone so a doctor can check a patient's entire vitals in seconds, and without wires.