Recently, the biggest medical competition in human history with a total prize money of up to 10,000,000 dollars—Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, hosted by XPRIZE foundation and sponsored by Qualcomm Foundation—has announced the only two teams which stand out from over 300 teams all over the world and make it to the final after three-year-long competition process. SEU School of Biological Sciences & Medical Engineering teacher, Cui Xingran, is a member of one of these two teams— Dynamical Biomarker Group, which is led by Harvard Medical School Professor Peng Zhongkang, a Chinese expert.
Dynamical Biomarker Group is mainly composed of doctors and engineers from both sides of the Taiwan Strait, among which Cui Xingran is mainly responsible for the atrial fibrillation testing project and at the same time helps with the Sleep Apnea detection project—use wearable ECG recorder to continuously recording body surface ECG signal to detect whether a person has symptoms of Atrial Fibrillation or Sleep Apnea in a noninvasive and automatic way
Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE is a Medical Diagnosis System development competition which uses “StarTrek” stories as its design concepts. The competition requires that all medical tricorders designed by the teams should weigh less than 5 pounds (about 2.3 kilograms), can continuously record 5 kinds of basic vital signs and detect 13 diseases or states of health—including 10 assigned items (anemia, urinary tract infection, type 2 diabetes, atrial fibrillation, etc.) and 3 optional items. The competition also requires that all users of these medical tricorders should be ordinary consumers who have no professional medical background at all.
By report, Professor Peng Zhongkang plans to continue developing second-generation equipment which is able to detect more than 50 kinds of diseases in order to help solve medical difficulties in China’s far-flung remote areas. Cui Xingran will extend his cooperation with Professor Peng Zhongkang on behalf of SEU, devoting himself into child development as well as early prevention and intervention treatments of mental diseases.
Xprize Foundation, which is founded in 1995, is famous for hosting hyper-difficult and high-prize money international competitions. The competitions it hosts are all themed around critical technological challenges which can exert great influences on the process of human civilization under its slogan of “Making the Impossible Possible”. This is now the 6th medical competition in history since the first in 1996. After five-year-long competition process and intense multi-stage elimination, Dynamical Biomarker Group has stood out from more than 300 teams around the world and is now in the final of the competition. The champion winner is scheduled to be announced in the second quarter of 2017.
