Change Agents: Walter De Brouwer's magical tricorder
- Walter De Brouwer wants to change the way people care for themselves with a device that monitors vital signs
- The Baby Boomer%27s pointed inspiration%3A %27Star Trek%27
- The genesis of De Brouwer%27s Scanadu%2C co-founded with his wife Sam%2C was a family nightmare
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, USA TODAY "Change Agents," a regular series that focuses on innovators looking to alter the shape of business and culture, makes its debut.)
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. – In a warren of cluttered old offices rooted in the past, Walter De Brouwer is working feverishly to conjure the future.
Founded in 1939 to explore the limits of propeller-driven aircraft, today, NASA's scaled-back Ames Research Center just south of San Francisco "is a mysterious and iconic place with lots of memories of the big brains who came through here," says De Brouwer.
Count his brain in that mix. Operating out of a two-story complex whose bathrooms date to the Cold War and whose last tenant departed a decade ago, De Brouwer, 55, and his team of about a dozen engineers are hammering away on a gadget that promises to revolutionize the way we monitor our health.
Named Scanadu after De Brouwer's affinity for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Xanadu-invoking poem, Kubla Khan – this Belgian entrepreneur's facile mind is as apt to drop literary references as it is pop culture ones – the company's handheld device takes vital signs, aggregates the data on an app and signals deviations from the norm. Scanadu is accepting early reservations for its device for $199 as of Wednesday at Scanadu.com.
In two decades as a European tech guru, De Brouwer has used his semiotics Ph.D for an eclectic array of pursuits, ranging from publishing a punk magazine to delving into abstract research on brain-computer interaction. But this time, it's personal.
De Brouwer and his wife, Sam, 42, co-founded Scanadu a year ago after a private nightmare. Eight years ago, their son Nelson, now 13, jumped out of a window at home thinking he could fly. He landed on his head. The couple, who also have another son, Lamara, 20, spent months in hospitals struggling to understand reams of technical information.
"You think you're smart, and then you realize you're not a doctor, and you understand nothing," says Sam, an elegant Frenchwoman who reports that despite the debilitating brain injury, today, Nelson is thriving in a special-ed program within nearby Cupertino High School. "It was a traumatic experience that left us thinking it would be great to create a tool that allows patients and doctors to communicate better."
Although a 19th-century poem may have provided their company's name, its product was inspired by none other than the 1960s TV series, Star Trek.
"You'll remember that the show had this magical device called a medical tricorder" which DeForest Kelley's character, Dr. "Bones" McCoy, needed merely to wave over a sick Starfleet officer to determine the ailment, Walter recalls with a boyish smile.
The fantasy gadget has given its name to the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize, which will dish out $10 million to the first company that comes up with a remote scanning apparatus that "can read key health metrics," as well as a set of 15 diseases. The contest has a twin in the Nokia Sensing XChallenge, whose pot is $2.25 million.
Among those vying for bragging rights in this futuristic field are BlackBerry inventor Mike Lazaridis, whose new $97 million Quantum Valley Investments Fund is aimed squarely at the undoubtedly lucrative latter-day tricorder market.
But for De Brouwer, who founded and sold a few companies in the booming late 1990s, it's less about the money and more about the magic of invention.
"In order to make medicine appeal to consumers, you have to bring something magical to it, so they can take stock of their health before they end up in (the emergency room) and in shock," he says. "Sooner or later, we all end up in ER. We think it only happens to the neighbors, but we are the neighbors."
Those who know the De Brouwers are betting on their success.
"Every entrepreneur says they're going to change the world and few do, but Walter might," says Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, a Web-based software business. "He's capable of really deep thought, which a problem of Scanadu's scale requires."
Nelson and his wife ran across the De Brouwers when they were looking into creating software that could help their autistic daughter. "We wanted to quantify her physical state as it compared to her environment, so we could see in what conditions she learned best," he says. "Scanadu caught our eye immediately."
De Brouwer is as "an out-of-the box thinker who lives in a world of cutting-edge ideas," says Lara Stein, director of TEDx, a global offshoot of Silicon Valley's Technology, Entertainment and Design conference and lecture series. As an entrepreneur, "he gives people room, but they have to deliver."
A "benign dictator" is what Monte Stettin calls his friend, "someone invested with an extraordinary amount of rigor and curiosity." Stettin's wife, Jacqueline Monash, is an investor in Scanadu. Stettin calls the venture "a world-changing vision led by a man with intellectual weight and great vision; plus, he can do math."
De Brouwer is aiming high. He's putting his device through Food and Drug Administration approvals, which he sees as vital to the acceptance of a radical product with no precedent. "We're talking about creation ex nihilo, out of nothing," he says. "You have to push the science to its limits. I tell the people working for me, 'If you get stopped, you have to find another way. Look up, it's out there.' "
Scanadu's Scout is a two-inch round device that checks everything from pulse to the blood's oxygen content by pinching it with two fingers and placing it against a temple.
The team is also working on offshoots that include Scanaflu (uses saliva to monitor for flu) and Scanaflo (uses urine to assess more complex issues). In both cases, a smartphone's camera reads the color spectrum of paper tabs exposed to saliva and urine.
In a short video created by Bay Area design consultants IDEO, which spotlights the company's five-year vision, a couple scans their child's rash and is told by the Scanadu app that bed rest should do the trick. In another segment, a child with a high fever has her urine analyzed. Scanadu recommends an ER visit and provides the address of the closest facility.
Ultimately, De Brouwer also wants to incorporate blood work into Scanadu's capabilities, which will allow for more sophisticated testing. "That one is tricky, because people do not like to have their fingers pricked," he says with a laugh. But he hopes imperceptible nano-needles could make that feature of Scanadu a reality one day.
De Brouwer is genial sort who laughs easily. His all-black garb, unkempt hair and ruddy complexion recalls the hip look of Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison. He and his wife have a few guilty pleasures that include long road trips with Nelson across their newly adopted home state of California, as well as watching the FX series The Americans, about Soviet moles romping through the big-hair '80s.
But at their core, the couple revels in work.
"Silicon Valley is for people who have given up the binary state of having a life and work. Their work is their life, and their life is their work. It's always been like that for me," says Walter, noting that he and Sam decided to uproot from Europe 18 months ago, mainly because the pace of innovation there was too slow. "I needed to be here."
While the U.S. tech epicenter is celebrated for its youthful billionaires, De Brouwer thinks "the older part of the technological Mayflower is arriving now. People my age think, 'I now have the necessary experience and I'm going to test my idea against the best of them.' "
Ultimately, De Brouwer believes all innovation "needs to have a moral agenda." NetSuite CEO Nelson says his driven pal is the "perfectly evolved entrepreneur, someone who's had success in the past and now sees that what he does must have a truly meaningful impact on society."
Says De Brouwer softly: "When someone is dying, we realize we have invested in so many things except learning how to help ourselves in life. It's almost like we've avoided inventing this thing, because it makes us think of our mortality. But I want to invent something that quietly checks up on us all the time."
He has no interest in putting doctors out of business. On the contrary, his goal is to make the patient-physician dialogue more productive.
"We should be talking with doctors as information analysts, rather than accountants of our medical records," he says, adding that he envisions a network of anonymously collected Scanadu medical data giving consumers instant interpretations of their condition, which could help them decide if it was time to visit a doctor.
"Medicine could benefit from the same disruption that Google provided for information," says De Brouwer, gazing beyond the shell of a former military blimp hanger and toward his Star Trek-inspired horizon. "Data wants to be free, and if our medical data is out there, maybe it can help us all."