the technologies needed to create new sensors are ready, the analytics needed to interpret the data is ready, the market is ready, “and you exist,” Diamandis told the audience. “This could not have been done 10 years ago. It can now,” he said. “Our goal really is to help stimulate and revolutionize healthcare. We need to expand sensors and sensing beyond disease management to areas like public health and fitness, and to give consumers 24/7 access to real-time data about their health.”
The challenge also is intended to supply the kind of innovative sensing technologies needed to win the ambitious $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize that was officially launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. (Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs previewed the idea for a mobile wireless health diagnostics device at last year’s WLSA summit.)
The Tricorder X Prize “is a competition that is asking teams to integrate sensors that will come out of the Nokia Sensing X Challenge, along with AI [artificial intelligence], cloud computing, and digital imaging, into handheld mobile devices that a consumer can use to diagnose themselves better than a board-certified doctor,” Diamandis said.
More than 185 teams from over 25 companies registered for the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize in the first 90 days after the competition was announced, Diamandis said, and he predicted that registration for the Nokia Sensing X Challenge would “at least meet if not exceed that.”
The challenge will be a global competition, open to any team that has developed “best in class” innovations in medical, mobile, sensors, and sensing technologies and will be judged based on “demonstrated validity, usability, relevance, originality, interoperability, and affordability.” Likely targets would be sensors needed for measuring biofluidics and tissues, structure and form, environment, kinematics, mood and emotion, and body physics.
