XPrize Announces Finalists Building Next-Gen Medical Sensors - IEEE Spectrum
Today’s home medicine kit is fairly limited when it comes to diagnostics: You can take your temperature, check your blood pressure, and give yourself a home pregnancy test, but that’s about it. The Nokia Sensing XChallenge (from the XPrize folks) aims to improve that situation by spurring inventors to create portable gadgets that consumers can use to collect accurate, real-time health information. The 11 finalist teams, announced today, are building gadgets that do lab tests, monitor heart disease, check vital signs, and more.
The Sensing XChallenge is distinct from a very similar competition, the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize, in which teams are vying to create a universal diagnostic tool along the lines of the handheld tool wielded by Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy. In the Tricorder contest, the devices are required to diagnose a specific list of 15 ailments, whereas in the sensing challenge the tools can be designed to do just about anything.
However, the XPrize doesn’t see redundancy here, but rather a symbiotic relationship, says Grant Campany, senior director of the sensing challenge. The Nokia contest is intended to reward teams for developing technologies that could be incorporated into a Tricorder device, he told IEEE Spectrum in an email. Several sensing teams are validating technologies for collaborating Tricorder teams, Campany says, which are racing to build at least 30 working Tricorder devices for consumer testing next year.
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