The Wall Street Journal just announced this year’s winners of its annual Technology Innovation Awards. The Gold winner, and the top entry in the Medicine-Biotech category, is Abbott Laboratories and its Ibis Biosciences unit that developed the T5000, a pathogen detecting scanner that uses a novel combination of mass spectrometry and mathematics to match up molecular readings against a large database of known genetic signatures. The Silver, and the winning selection in the Medical Devices category, went to Touch Bionics for the i-Limb hand prosthesis which we’ve been following over the last couple of years. The device has individual powered fingers and is probably the most advanced artificial hand on the market today. The winner of the Health-Care IT category is DataDyne.org, a non profit out of Washington, D.C., which developed EpiSurveyor, a software package for mobile phones that helps collect health information in developing countries. The idea is to help move away from paper records that slow down analysis of disease outbreaks and keep remote regions from receiving timely help.
Link: The Wall Street Journal 2009 Technology Innovation Awards
Product pages: T5000 Biosensor; i-LIMB Hand; EpiSurveyor
Flashbacks: Anthrax Investigation Highlights Modern Biomolecular Forensic Technology; New Video Demonstrating i-Limb from Touch Bionics; I-Limb Bionic Hand Gets Upgradable Bionic Arm; Video of i-LIMB Hand; World’s First Bionic Hand Makes It to Market