By Matthew Holt

Today XPRIZE announced the 12 finalists for the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE. This is a $2.25m prize competition to advance the ability to use sensors to measure and manage health, and it’s something that we’re fascinated by at Health 2.0.

We’re even more thrilled to tell you that on October 2nd the winners will be unveiled live on stage at Health 2.0’s Fall Conference by our friends at XPRIZE and Nokia, the XChALLENGE’s sponsor. The 12 finalists come from the US, Israel, Japan and the UK and run the gamut in new diagnostic tools. Details below the fold, but this is going to change how we measure health–not to mention it’ll also be lots of fun!

The twelve teams who got to this stage are:

• 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.

Learn more at the  Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE site.