By Kim Krueger

XPRIZE  announced the 10 finalist teams competing for the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a 3.5-year global competition sponsored by the Qualcomm Foundation for teams to develop a consumer-focused, mobile device capable of diagnosing and interpreting a set of 15 medical conditions and capturing five vital health metrics. Launched in January 2012, the competition encourages the development of a device much like the medical Tricorder of Star Trek fame.

The Tricorder prize is something we’ve supported since its launch, and last year at the 7th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference, we got to host part of another XPRIZE competition: the Nokia Sensing CHALLENGE, a $2.25 million global competition to accelerate the development of sensors and sensing technology that is smaller, lighter, and capable of capturing true clinical data on a personal level. The teams on display were examples of how Health 2.0 technologies are pushing the boundaries of access, diagnosis, and discovery.

The recently announced finalists for the Tricorder prize promise to be equally impressive as they work to move the science fiction of the Star Trek Tricorder to science reality. The ten teams represent diverse backgrounds from non-profits to academia to start-ups, and include:

• Aezon (Rockville, Md.), led by Tatiana Rypinski, a team of student engineers from Johns Hopkins University partnering with the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design.
• CloudDX (Mississauga, Canada), a team from medical devices manufacturer Biosign and led by company chief medical officer, Dr. Sonny Kohli.
• Danvantri (Chennai, India), a team from technology manufacturer American Megatrends India and led by company Director and CEO, Sridharan Mani.
• DMI (Cambridge, Mass.), a team led by Dr. Eugene Y. Chan of the DNA Medicine Institute partnering with NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
• Dynamical Biomarkers Group (Zhongli City, Taiwan), a team of physicians, scientists and engineers led by Harvard Medical School professor Chung-Kang Peng.
• Final Frontier Medical Devices (Paoli, Pa.), a team led by the founders of Basil Leaf Technologies—brothers Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency room physician, and George Harris, a network engineer.
• MESI Simplifying diagnostics (Ljubljana, Slovenia), a team from diagnostic medical device manufacturer MESI and led by company CEO, Jakob Susteric.
• SCANADU (Moffett Field, Calif.), a team from Silicon Valley-based start-up SCANADU led by technology entrepreneur and company co-founder and CEO, Walter De Brouwer.
• SCANurse (London, England), a team from diagnostic medical manufacturer SCANurse and led by biomedical engineer and company founder, Anil Vaidya.
• zensor (Belfast, Ireland), a team from clinical sensor and electrode company Intelesens and led by chief technology officer, Prof. Jim McLaughlin.

Matthew Holt had a chance to speak with Grant Campany, the Senior Director of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE and Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE, about the finalists and the competition. We’re excited to follow these teams on their quest and see how their technologies change our world. To hear more, take a look at the interview below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAr3PKFbK7w]

Kim Krueger is a Research Analyst at Health 2.0.