10 Finalist Teams for Tricorder XPrize Compete to Make Consumer-Friendly Device a Reality
Thanks to the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize competition, consumers could soon have the same diagnostic capabilities as Star Trek’s Leonard “Bones” McCoy. The ten finalist engineers have just been announced, with judges expected to make their final decisions based on both diagnostic accuracy and consumer experience by the end of 2015. The FDA will be consulting with all teams throughout the competition to prepare them for regulatory review as well, which means these devices could become commercially available shortly after. From Spectrum IEEE:
The Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize announced its ten finalist teams yesterday at the annual conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). Each team must now get to work on building a consumer-friendly device that can diagnose 15 diseases and measure 5 vital signs. At the EMBS meeting there’s been a lot of talk about distributing healthcare technologies, shifting power from doctors to patients, and letting people manage their own care with sensors and data analytics. The Tricorder XPrize expresses this theme neatly with its tagline: “Healthcare in the palm of your hand.”
The finalist teams include Scanadu, a Silicon Valley startup that Spectrum has written about before. Another contender that looks like a heavyweight is Boston-based Team DMI, which is building a device that uses a drop of blood for diagnoses, based on single-molecule DNA scanning. The roster of finalists is impressively international, with other teams hailing from India, Canada, Taiwan, and several European countries.
Today’s wearable devices can already measure vital signs without much difficulty. But the disease diagnoses will pose a real challenge. The 21st century tricorders must be able to diagnose such conditions as diabetes, stroke, pneumonia, tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and the heart condition atrial fibrillation.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
