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LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwire) -- 01/08/13 -- The X PRIZE Foundation announced that final competition guidelines have been released and team registration is officially open for the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE, a 3.5-year global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies, intended to make reliable health diagnoses available directly to consumers anytime, anywhere. More than 255 teams from 34 countries have already pre-registered.

The announcement was made yesterday at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), just one year after the competition was launched at CES 2012, during a keynote address by Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, chair of the Qualcomm Foundation, and chairman and chief executive officer of Qualcomm Incorporated. Additional information about the competition will also be available at Booth #25321, Las Vegas Convention Center, South Hall 2.

Competing teams in the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE will be expected to develop a device that can detect or monitor three broad groups of conditions or parameters: the core set, vital signs set, and elective set. The core set is composed of conditions that are considered essential to any successful team solution, with many of these already covered by commercially available standalone diagnostic systems or sensors. This set of 12 diseases includes diabetes, atrial fibrillation, stroke, tuberculosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pneumonia, and hepatitis A, among others.

"Several factors drove us to select the initial medical conditions that the Tricorder must accurately diagnose," said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO, X PRIZE Foundation. "Input came from our medical advisory board as well as from public comment. Overall, we considered the significance of a disease in terms of prevalence, incidence and potential threat, as well as the effectiveness of treatments. In success, the technology created by the teams competing for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE will allow the consumer to access their state of health in a manner that may assist in the diagnoses of these diseases, anytime, anywhere, all in the palm of their hand."

The vital signs set is intended to challenge teams to move toward a continuous monitoring and cloud-based paradigm. These metrics for health include blood pressure, respiratory rate, temperature, electrocardiography and oxygen saturation. Ultimately, a winning device will collect large volumes of data from the ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements. It is anticipated that some of these solutions will be developed as part of the $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE, a global competition to accelerate the development of sensing technologies that capture and interpret information about our physical state, emotional state and surrounding environment.

The elective set is also composed of important conditions, including pertussis (whooping cough), hypertension, mononucleosis, hyper/hypo thyroidism, food-borne illnesses, melanoma, HIV and osteoporosis, among others. This list is considered more ambitious than the core set in light of the current state of technology.