Ten million dollars is up for grabs to companies, students or researchers who can come up with the best digital health devices to noninvasively diagnose 15 diseases.
But developing that device is a costly endeavor for the 30 teams vying for the Tricorder XPRIZE (four have dropped out since the finalists were announced in November).
Last summer, the most high-profile contender, Scanadu, completed a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign where it raised $1.7 million and enlisted the help of donors to test its device.
Now a few other teams are enlisting the crowd’s help with funding their projects. One of those teams is a group of students at Johns Hopkins University that’s going by the name Aezon. The team is hoping to round up $10,000 to have a higher quality prototype built for usability and accuracy testing.
Aezon’s approach combines three components: a wearable device, a lab box and a cloud-based smartphone app. A spin-off company called Aegle was formed to accelerate development of the wearable device, which monitors vital signs like blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rate and body temperature. The small lab box reads disposable cartridges that test fluid samples for diseases like strep throat and urinary tract infection. Data from both devices are aggregated in the cloud and displayed on the smartphone app.
With a few weeks of the campaign left, the group is about one-quarter of the way to its funding goal.
Distributed Health Labs has had a little more success, garnering almost $10,000 through its Indiegogo campaign, which ends Thursday. The team’s approach is a bit different, as it also includes environmental factors as a key component of disease. Here’s how the team, based at the Qualcomm Institute in San Diego, describes its technology:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
1. A sensor measures your vitals just by touching you. Another sensor analyzes liquids, such as water or blood, for things that shouldn’t be there.
2. The data goes to your smartphone, which displays measurements and provides a diagnosis.
3. Certain kinds of data can be shared, helping the system get better at creating a living map for our health. This data gets fed back to you to make your OASIS device work better and give you practical health information.
The SENSE device contains an optical and electronic sensor array to measure vital signs and an electrochemical sensor to measure environmental pollutants. With the prototype nearly complete, the team is looking to the crowd to fund manufacturing and help build the data mass needed to make the analytics work.
The clock is ticking for teams as they prepare to present their projects to a team of industry-leader judges in April. As many as 10 teams will advance to the final round, where their devices will be tested by a consumer panel.
[Image credit: Aezon and Distributed Health]
