Communicators would be something like Bluetooth earpieces.
You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.
> You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.
In fairness, a tricorder would probably need to be a device capable of gathering data about quantum fields within an extremely local region of space and then analyzing based on known frames of reference and data models, so we're probably a ways off on that one.
The harder part of that challenge is building a device capable of analyzing quantum fields in the most abstract sense. But once that's done, even if it's in the form of a massive machine that can only analyze spacetime in a small chamber, even if that machine is rooms-big, the race to the first tricorder begins.
(I could be completely off-base with my comment on analyzing quantum fields. I'm not at all an expert.)
I literally bought a Bluetooth enabled TNG-style comm badge for my partner for Christmas.
TOS-style communicators are basically flip-phones with absurd range.
Given that WiFi signals can be used as wall-penetrating radars capable of pose, breathing, and pulse determination, that could be added without too much difficulty.
Likewise broad range IR and UV cameras (which I assume will become standard when phone manufacturers can no longer differentiate by zoom, just as they added zoom when everyone had enough megapixels).
Geiger counter would probably just upset people when they realise even organic bananas contain radioactive potassium, but could be done.
Carbon monoxide and other air quality sensors are fairly plausible IMO. Not sure how many you could put in a phone (zero? Just CO? Whole mass spectrometer?), but I can see the desire.
Make an atomic clock good enough and small enough, and you could detect temporal anomalies caused by the nearby football stadium filling up (no, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582161)
My head-cannon is the small cylinder prop used in the medical tricorder is supposed to be a miniature MRI or CT scanner. I suspect either would be a mistake to add to a consumer product.
You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.