25 February 2013 Last updated at 04:25 ET By Peter Bowes BBC News, Los Angeles

Prevention not cure has always been good health advice but the trick has been to diagnose early enough. Now a range of medical technologies for use both inside and outside the body may give prevention the upper hand and close the gap between diagnosis and cure.

Nowadays doctors are able to monitor the health of their patients without meeting them. Sensors, such as heart monitors or other implanted devices, can send data via smart phones to hospitals and health professionals to help them spot problems before they occur.

But in the future this growing area of medicine may go from the edge to the centre of medicine and have an impact on human longevity.

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize will give $10m (6.5m) to the developer of a wireless hand-held device that monitors and diagnoses health conditions. Its sponsors, the X-Prize Foundation, a US charity, and Qualcomm, a US telecommunications technology firm, were inspired by the tricorder - a hi-tech sensor used by the characters in Star Trek, the science fiction television serial.

"If we look at the history of technology over the last hundred years, it has extended life in a dramatic way," says Don Jones, vice president of global strategy and market development, with Qualcomm Life, a company that makes wireless technology for use in healthcare.

Body monitoring and body computing will become so ubiquitous that they will be part of our cultural dialogue

"I think we're going to see new technologies we have trouble imagining today, in the same way that Star Trek imagined the tricorder in the 1960s. Today we actually believe that such things are possible," he says.

The plan is to develop a device that can scan the body and obtain measurements of different medical states or conditions.

"The data would be used to inform the consumer about their state of health and potentially make recommendations about what they might do," says Mark Winter, senior director at the X-Prize Foundation.

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