For the past four months, teams from all over the globe have been utilizing the latest in sensor technologies to change the way we understand our health. They’re all competing for the $525,000 grand prize and up to five additional $120,000 prizes in the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE.
The purpose of the XCHALLENGE is “to accelerate the availability of hardware sensors and software sensing technology that individuals use to access, understand, and improve their health and well-being. Innovation in sensing is an important component to creating a means for appealing, usable, smarter digital health solutions.” Teams are judged on a variety of criteria, such as technical innovation, accuracy, and reliability, but also on portability, ease of use, and whether their concept is relevant to current public health needs.
The judges have selected the finalists who will refine their devices over the next month or so before the winners are announced on October 2. Here’s who made it to the final round:
- ABUS-urodynamics (Asahikawa, Japan), an urodynamic study instrumentation group in the urologic surgery department of Asahikawa Medical University.
- apollo (Pittsburgh, Penn.), focused on developing the world’s smallest spectrometer-on-a-chip to detect personal vital and health signals non-invasively.
- Elfi-Tech (Rehovot, Israel), founded in 2006 to develop technology in the field of non-invasive monitoring of physiological parameters.
- Holomic (Los Angeles, Calif.), a team of experts in the medical device industry with specific expertise in creating photonics-based technologies for mobile health applications.
- i-calQ (Salt Lake City, Utah), creating the world’s first smart phone-based quantitative point-of-care integrated diagnostic solution.
- InSilixa (Sunnyvale, Calif.), a multidisciplinary, highly technical group focused on developing a hand-held, fully-integrated point-of-care DNA-based diagnostic tool.
- MoboSens (Urbana, Ill.), comprised of professors, scientists, engineers and graduate students from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
- Nanobiosym Health RADAR (Cambridge, Mass.), an advanced nanotech incubator and research institute.
- Owlstone (Cambridge, UK), a pioneer in the commercialization of state-of-the-art chemical detection systems.
- Programmable-Bio-Nano-Chip (Houston, Texas), a medical microdevice research group from Rice University committed to improving the speed, accuracy and affordability of disease diagnosis.
- QUASAR (San Diego, Calif.), a world leader in noninvasive biosensing systems.
- Silicon BioDevices (Palo Alto, Calif.) a point-of-care diagnostics startup company formed to commercialize a novel sensor technology.
Good luck to all 12 teams!