Two finalists in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE join forces to take the Star Trek Tricorder from fiction to fact.
Jim McLaughlin, chief technology officer of Intelesens and director at Ulster University’s Nanotechnology and Integrated BioEngineering Centre, has joined forces with Team Scanadu in a bid to win the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE.
The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE is a $10m competition to create a medical Tricorder inspired by those seen in Star Trek. To win the competition the device created needs to be able to capture key health metrics, such as blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature, and diagnose a set of 16 diseases. It also needs to weigh less than 5 pounds (2.27kg).
Two teams that entered this challenge, one from US-based medtech company Scandau, and the other from UK-based Intelesens, have joined forces.
McLaughlin said: “In the space of wearable medical technology, there is a convergence of traditional medical devices and consumer products, in more and more areas of functionality. By working together and playing on each other’s strengths, Team Scanadu/Intelesens expects to bring the reliability and accuracy of many areas of the medical device industry to the fast-paced world of the consumer.”
Both teams were announced as finalists in the challenge in August 2014. Trials of the finalists technologies will start in June 2015 with final judging expected to take place in early 2016.
