Philly team wins $2.5 million grand prize at Qualcomm’s medical device competition

A Paoli, Pa.-based team of seven working out of a living room just won the top prize at the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE global competition, beating out some big-league, top-dollar competition.

Team Final Frontier Medical Devices, led by Basil Leaf CEO Dr. Basil Harris, was announced as the winner amid cheers last night, following a four-year-long research process.

YES!!! Our very own @pfilbert won the #TricorderXPRIZE with Final Frontier—a Philly-based team! We're SO proud! 🎉 https://t.co/8gIhaDHQIv pic.twitter.com/M5wARsRweH

— Think Company (@thinkcompany) April 13, 2017

Put in context the team’s triumph is rather impressive. An initial cohort of over 300 teams from all over the world pitched their devices in 2013. During the following years, a selected crop of only 30 teams — some as large as forty people — got to work on their projects. For the final round of two teams, Final Frontier was faced up against a team of 39 researchers working with backing from Taiwanese consumer electronics company HTC.

We won! So proud to be a part of @BasilLeafTech for the @Qualcomm tricorder @xprize competition!

— Phil Charron (@philipcharron) April 13, 2017

Think Company’s Phil Charron was part of the team behind DxtER, the group’s proposed device, which is able to diagnose 34 health conditions using different data streams and an artificial intelligence engine.

“It has been a thrill and an honor to practice my craft with my Xprize team,” Charron told Technical.ly. “I met Basil and his siblings when I was 12 years old. They were makers before makers was a thing, and it paid off big time. Our winning advantage was using an evidence-based approach to engineering and design—something that assures success, but is practiced so rarely.”

Regardless of the outcome of the competition, Think Company had been planning an event called Design and the Future of Healthcare: Learn from an IOT Inventor on April 17 to share the story of the development process and the lessons learned from making DxtER. Likely, the event will now get just got a lil more crowded, so you might want to RSVP now.