PCB007 Magazine

PCB007-Nov2018

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24 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2018 tion. The interesting takeaway of this competi- tion is that creating a handheld medical labo- ratory could give us insight into what the next generation of cellphone capabilities might in- clude! Finalists A total of 300 teams entered and were thor- oughly vetted and reduced to 34 registered teams in the competition, which was further reduced to seven teams with two emerging to compete in the final round. These two final - ists were the Taiwanese Dynamical Biomarkers Group and Final Frontier Medical Devices (got- ta love the name!) out of the United States. Dynamical Biomarkers Group of Zhongli City, Taiwan, included a team of physicians, physicists, scientists, engineers, and design- ers charged. Dr. Chung-Kang Peng of Harvard Medical School founded the team in 2013 and was co-led by Dr. Edward Chang from HTC Cor- poration's research and healthcare division (a mobile technology company). Their DeepQ tri- corder device included four main components: smartphone, vital signs monitoring set, scope set, and blood/urine/breath tests. All subsys- tems connect to a smartphone app. The Final Frontier Medical Devices team from Paoli, Pennsylvania, was led by the founders of Basil Leaf Technologies—brothers Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency room physician, and George Harris, a network engineer. They created a portable, con- sumer-friendly device— DxtER (pronounced "Dexter")—capable of collecting and interpret- ing large amounts of di- agnostic data giving re- al-time insight into 22 medical conditions. "It is an impressive achievement for these two teams to advance to the consumer test- ing stage of the com- petition with their de- vices," said Grant Cam- pany, prize lead for the competition, "This stage not only takes us one step closer to transforming a sci-fi vision into a real-world impact, but more importantly, we are another important step closer to bringing a very user-friendly device to consumers around the globe, allowing them to proactively man- age their own health in a way that has never been done before." Winner And the prize goes to…Final Frontier Medi- cal Devices (Figure 1)! After four years of de- velopment, their AI-based engine learned to diagnose medical conditions by integrating in- formation from clinical emergency medicine with data analysis from actual patients. DxtER includes a group of non-invasive sensors de- signed to collect data about vital signs, body chemistries, and biological functions, which is then synthesized in the device's diagnostic en- gine to make a quick and accurate assessment (Figure 2). The Not-So-Final-Frontier While Bones and his medical crew were the users of tricorder technology in Star Trek, the purpose of this contest is to develop medi- cal diagnostic devices that the average person can use to improve their health. Today, most of us have used some kind of wearable de- vice to monitor our steps, exercise, heart rate, etc. However, as an eight-year-old watching Figure 1: The winner, Final Frontier Medical Devices, receiving the XPRIZE check.

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