Next week: How Think Company’s Phil Charron helped make a world-class Star Trek-y gizmo

Back in 2013, a Think Company exec joined a team of seven that had set a brash goal for themselves: to design a world-class medical device from a Paoli living room.

Four years of research later, the team led by Basil Leaf CEO Dr. Basil Harris beat 312 other teams from 38 and became one of two teams in the final stretch of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition. The effort yielded a prototype tricorder called DxtER.

Here’s Dr. Harris giving us the primer on DxtER and its developing team, called “Final Frontier Medical Devices“:

The team that gets the final nod in the contest stands to earn a $9 million prize. To celebrate the team’s high ranking — and also to tell the world the story behind DxtER — Think Company is hosting an event called Design and the Future of Healthcare: Learn from an IOT Inventor on April 17.

Dr. Harris and Charron will speak to the design process. They will be joined by Erik Viirre, the competition’s medical director. Dr. Harris and Phil will demo DxtER, discuss their process and open the discussion up for an audience Q&A.

“It’s really cool to see a team from the Philly region make it so far in a global competition like this,” said Think Company’s comms director Suzanne Colter. “It’s a great thing for our city to have technologists, designers, engineers and healthcare professionals not only represented but teaming up and beating out a majority of the competition. The device also sounds pretty fascinating —attendees will learn a lot about what actually goes into building something like this, and we’ll have a chance to talk more about IoT in healthcare.”