Exponentials Help Fuel Social Change

Businesses are developing technologies that can diagnose diseases, immerse students in a virtual field trip, and aid amputees, among other social benefits.

Businesses are increasingly looking beyond the bottom line in identifying areas ripe for technology investment. Exponential technologies, whose performance relative to cost and size is rapidly accelerating, offer new ways to catalyze transformational social change. Here, three organizations demonstrate how innovative business technologies can drive positive outcomes in the social sphere.

The Race to Wellness

Generally, unmet consumer need drives innovation. Yet this isn’t always the case in the health care industry. In an age of technology-enabled individual empowerment, patients often lack opportunities to receive medical care without going to a clinic or hospital—a limitation that can create inefficiencies and drive up prices.

To help address this challenge, in late 2011, Qualcomm Incorporated, a developer of advanced wireless technologies, products, and solutions, expanded its focus on wireless health solutions. The Qualcomm Foundation, its philanthropic arm, sponsored the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a global competition launched and operated by the XPRIZE Foundation, in which teams are competing to develop a portable, wireless device that accurately diagnoses a set of diseases independent of a health care professional or facility. The team with the best design and diagnostic performance will pocket up to $10 million.¹

According to Rick Valencia, president at Qualcomm Life, Inc., Qualcomm’s health care subsidiary, support for this competition is driven by Qualcomm’s commitment to promoting innovation in health care. “Trying to address challenges in an area like diagnostics is not easy. But we strongly believe that mobile technology has a role to play in that effort—it can help make convenient, affordable care more accessible to more people,” he says.

Inspired by the medical Tricorder prop from “Star Trek,” first shown to TV viewers 50 years ago, the devices are expected to accurately diagnose 13 health conditions. They should also continuously monitor five vital signs in real time and provide a compelling consumer experience. The only other design limitation is that the device must weigh under five pounds.

The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition is nearing its final stages. An initial field of roughly 300 entrants has been narrowed to two finalists: Final Frontier Medical Devices from the U.S. and Dynamical Biomarkers Group from Taiwan. As the teams advance to the final round of the competition, their devices will undergo consumer testing through early 2017 at the Altman Clinical Translational Research Institute at the University of California, San Diego. The winning design will be announced in early 2017, he says.

A Virtual Field Trip of Dreams

“At Google, we’re often willing to experiment and innovate with leading-edge technology before we fully understand the near-term commercial viability of the product—as long as we’re aiming to solve an important problem or meet a critical need,” says Jonathan Rochelle, product manager for Google Education.

This approach is providing Rochelle with the resources and creative leeway he needs to pursue his latest project: Google Expeditions, a virtual reality (VR) platform built for the classroom. While its long-term ambitions are far-reaching, the first iteration takes aim at improving an educational mainstay: the field trip.

Rochelle and his team are working with teachers and content partners from around the world to create tours that will immerse students in new experiences and learning environments by enabling them to explore distant locales—from Antarctica to the International Space Station—without ever leaving their classes. A teacher acts as the guide, leading students through collections of 360-degree panoramas and 3D images supported by supplemental materials. And field trips are only the first frontier. Students who want to study shark anatomy can immerse themselves in a virtual viewing tank for five minutes to study one up close. Those interested in organic chemistry can explore the molecular compounds that are central to all living creatures.

Expeditions, which was born during a hackathon, makes it possible for one leader to guide multiple people on a virtual journey. The first iteration featured two panoramas: a tour of the Taj Mahal and a view from space. “When we tried this out for the first time, we realized we were onto something special: a VR solution that gives students the freedom to explore and delivers some basic level of control for teachers,” says Rochelle. “I’ve never seen such immediate buy-in and agreement on the potential for a product. Everyone who tries it immediately gets excited.”

Expeditions is still in its early days, but Google has already created more than 400 tours. Rochelle and his team are testing the Expeditions beta product in classrooms, where teachers and students take it for a trial run and provide feedback. “We are not educators, and we want to be sure that educators guide the development of this product,” says Rochelle, adding that more than 1 million students from 11 countries have tested Expeditions.

Expeditions is a feather in the Google VR development team’s cap. But, says Rochelle, it is also proof that VR innovations can move forward without an immediately viable business model. “My goal is to take incredible technologies and make them useful for educators. If they work in that capacity, they will likely work in other capacities, too,” he says.

Offering a Helping Hand

Aware that staggering development costs had put prosthetics beyond the reach of many hand amputees, Joel Gibbard, an engineering major studying robotics, launched a project at his university to develop a low-cost robotic prosthetic.² Today, Gibbard is CEO of Open Bionics, a U.K. startup that is using open source 3D printing software, robotic sensors, and financial capital from crowdfunding efforts to create a bionic hand that is less costly to produce than some others on the market.

Where other robotic prosthetics take months to make and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Open Bionics can build one in days for thousands of dollars. This means its prosthetics are more accessible to amputees across the developing world. What’s more, Open Bionics’ prosthetic hands match more expensive prosthetics in terms of functionality and, because they are lighter and custom-made, they are often more comfortable for the wearer.

Open Bionics’ efforts are attracting attention worldwide, which has brought in additional funding and sparked potentially beneficial partnerships. In 2015, the company took home a $200,000 prize for a second-place win in Intel’s “Make it Wearable” challenge. The company’s products are open source, and the company recently announced it would make that code available, which would allow individuals to download and 3D print their own prosthetics.³