Tricorder XPrize: 10 Finalist Prototypes
The XPrize competition promises to make Star Trek's Tricorder a reality of sorts, with the winning device a compact sensor for vital signs and a variety of diseases. Check out these mockups from the 10 finalists.
The original Star Trek Tricorder was assembled by a Hollywood prop department, with a salt shaker for the detachable scanner Dr. McCoy waved over the patient, with this sound effect added in postproduction. The team that wins the Qualcom Tricorder XPrize will have to produce a version that actually works.
The 10 finalist teams were announced Wednesday during the opening ceremony of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society International Conference in Chicago.
Under the rules of the competition, the winning device is expected to capture key health metrics and diagnose a set of 15 diseases. Health metrics could include blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature, according to prize organizers. Core diseases it will be expected to diagnose include anemia, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, stroke, and urinary tract infection. In addition, device development teams must choose three elective conditions to screen for from a list that includes high cholesterol, food-borne illness, HIV, hypertension, and strep throat. The winning device doesn't actually have to be a single gadget -- teams have flexibility in the choice of components -- but the whole package must weigh in at less than five pounds.
"It's a very aggressive competition and a very hard competition," said Dr. Erik Viirre, technical and medical director for the Tricorder XPrize. "Many technologies have to be brought together and integrated in a usable fashion." More than 300 teams initially expressed interest, but that dwindled to 21 who entered the qualifying round last year. The 10 finalists are those who presented the most convincing plans and prototypes. They include established medical device manufacturers, startups formed specifically for the contest, and university research teams.
In addition to meeting the base requirements of the contest, the winner might well be chosen based on how easy a device is to use and how understandable its display of medical data is, Viirre said. Although the fictional Tricorder was a tool for doctors and scientists, the winning entry in the contest will cater to consumers, he said.
The goal is "an integrated system that can evaluate a variety of human health conditions," Viirre said. "There are lots of single-use devices that monitor diabetes, but that's all they do. Ultimately, what we want for human health is a device that can do blood and urine and body testing and be useful across the breadth of human diseases. And it has to be usable by the average person -- you don't have to be Mister Spock to operate the Tricorder of the 21st century."
Professional clinicians might want to use it, too. However, the way it's likely to be most useful to them is as a device they can send home with a patient for continuous monitoring and the patient can bring back to a follow-up office visit with a trove of recorded data, he said.
Launched in January 2012 at the Consumer Electronics Show, the Tricorder XPrize promises $10 million in rewards to the teams that do the best job of meeting its ambitious goal. The first-place team will walk away with $7 million and a significant public relations coup. Funding for the challenge is coming from the Qualcomm Foundation. The US Food and Drug Administration is working with the teams to help them prepare their devices for the required regulatory approvals.
Like the Google Lunar XPrize -- a challenge to land a personal robot on the moon -- the Tricorder prize aims to stretch the limits of current technology. Founded in 1995, the core XPrize organization focuses on "grand challenge" problems, using a prize system like the one that once motivated Charles Lindberg to make the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic.
Viirre said he is confident that all the finalists are closing in on the goal, having submitted not just mission statements but documentation and data about their design concepts and prototypes. The finalists have additional time to produce actual working hardware, which will be subjected to testing against the contest criteria in late 2015, with the winners to be announced in early 2016.
Click through our slideshow to learn more about the finalists and see their 10 prototypes.
The CloudDX team was organized by medical devices manufacturer Biosign and is led by company chief medical officer Dr. Sonny Kohli. The centerpiece of the submission is the Pulsewave MAX device (above), the next iteration of Biosign's Pulsewave product already available in the market. It incorporates four separate sensor technologies: an upgraded blood pressure cuff, a blood oxygen sensor, a sensitive thermometer, and a two-lead electrocardiograph. Biosign said the device will measure the four parameters simultaneously and produce six additional measurements via cloud-based computer algorithms.
Organized by technology manufacturer American Megatrends India and led by company director and CEO Sridharan Mani, this team is named after the medicine god of India. In the project submission video, Mani talks about wanting to democratize access to medical care and make it more broadly available with the help of technology.
This team from diagnostic medical device manufacturer MESI and led by CEO Jakob Susteric wants to improve the availability of accurate clinical diagnostics outside a healthcare facility. According to a blog post describing the product, it consists of a smartphone application paired with a medical-grade wristband and other sensor modules, enabling continuous monitoring.
The Zensor is being created by a team from clinical sensor and electrode company Intelesens and led by Ian McCullough, a design engineer. It targets patients who need to be monitored outside of the hospital, including those with chronic conditions or cardiac illness, or who are recovering from hospital procedures. In addition to incorporating leading-edge medical technology, Intelesens said it concentrated on design, packaging the technology into a "sleek, lightweight, rechargeable, unobtrusive device."
Led by Tatiana Rypinski, Aezon is a team of student engineers from Johns Hopkins University working in partnership with the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design. Besides participating in the XPrize, they are running an Indiegogo campaign to underwrite their work.
According to the project website, the Aezon includes:
-- A vitals monitoring unit, being developed by Aegle, that continuously tracks ECG, spO2, blood pressure, and respiration rate.
-- The lab box (pictured), a light, portable device that reads disposable test cartridges. Each cartridge includes tests for diseases ranging from streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat) to urinary tract infection.
-- A smartphone app that accumulates and analyzes all of the data from the vitals monitoring unit and the lab box, offering patients a seamless way to track their health.
-- A cloud service where user data is securely stored and can be accessed and analyzed using the Aezon Web application.
This team of doctors, scientists, and engineers led by Harvard Medical School professor Chung-Kang Peng says its design goals are to deliver:
high diagnostic accuracy,
light weight and portability,
"superb" user experience (ease of use),
and flexible connectivity to transport data to the cloud.
Silicon Valley-based start-up Scanadu is led by technology entrepreneur, company co-founder, and CEO Walter De Brouwer. The promise made on its website is to let you "check your health as easily as your email." You take readings with the Scanadu Scout by touching it to your forehead.
Led by Dr. Eugene Y. Chan of the DNA Medicine Institute, the DMI team hopes to create a new device based on the company's rHealth finger-stick device developed in partnership with NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The XPrize project expands on the rHealth's technologies for monitoring the health of astronauts including single-molecule fluorescent scanning, a technique that uses lasers to do DNA analysis. As explained in the prize submission video, DMI doesn't expect to produce the sleekest industrial design but thinks it has a head start on offering clinically meaningful results from a drop of blood.
Final Frontier is led by the founders of Basil Leaf Technologies -- brothers Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency room physician, and George Harris, a network engineer.
"By leveraging technological advances in wireless monitoring, artificial intelligence, and affordable point-of-care biomedical processes, new opportunities in consumer-driven, in-home, medical diagnostic tools are not only possible, but they are the future of health care," the group promises on its website.
Basil Leaf's DxtER (pronounced Dexter) will be "a portable, consumer-level device capable of collecting and interpreting large amounts of data to accurately diagnose specific medical conditions, provide users with real-time insight regarding their health, and guide them to appropriate action," says the company.
Diagnostic medical manufacturer SCANurse is a startup created specifically by biomedical engineer and company founder Anil Vaidya to compete for the XPrize. It promises to combine multiple novel but existing technologies "to solve multiple sensing challenges, from breath analysis to movement and visual analysis." To maintain simplicity SCANurse says the product will not depend on the user taking biological samples such as blood.
SCANurse doesn't appear to have published an image of its prototype, but here's Vaidya's video pitch:
Diagnostic medical manufacturer SCANurse is a startup created specifically by biomedical engineer and company founder Anil Vaidya to compete for the XPrize. It promises to combine multiple novel but existing technologies "to solve multiple sensing challenges, from breath analysis to movement and visual analysis." To maintain simplicity SCANurse says the product will not depend on the user taking biological samples such as blood.
SCANurse doesn't appear to have published an image of its prototype, but here's Vaidya's video pitch:
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