The much-awaited list of finalists for the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE has finally been released. They come from all over the world - U.S., India, Taiwan, Canada, England, Slovenia and Northern Ireland. 

Taking inspiration from Star Trek's tricorder device, the global competition - a partership between Qualcomm Foundation and XPrize Foundation - is meant to disrupt the healthcare industry by encouraging the development of an mhealth device "that will give consumers access to their state of health in the palm of their hand." The goal is also "to make medical diagnoses independent of a physician or healthcare provider." 

The competition was announced back in January 2012. Now, more than two and a half years later, the finalists have been named.

A slideshow below presents the teams in alphabetical order. The photos, where available, come from the XPRIZE Foundation.

Aezon 

Location: Baltimore, Maryland

Team Leader: Tatiana Rypinski, a biomedical engineering student at Johns Hopkins University.

Solution: Aezon's solution has four parts that combine to form an integrated system. The prototype device - the vitals monitoring unit - is being built by a startup called Aeglee and is able to continuously track ECG, spO2, blood pressure, and respiration rate. The vitals monitoring unit, a wearable device, is able to acquire all this data from a single location on the body.

The second piece is the lab box, a portable device that functions as a reader of test cartridges. Each cartridge includes tests for a number of common maladies including streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat) and urinary tract infection among others. 

A companion smartphone app collects and analyzes data from the vitals monitoring unit and the lab box. The app tracks all the data and prompts consumers to do relevant tests.

All the data is stored in cloud and can be shared. 

 Lab Box