The Blue Box

Client: The Blue Box · Product: Blue Box

The Blue Box has a clear goal, and that is to bring a change in the way society deals with breast cancer, shifting the focus from reactive to preventive medicine.

If a biomedical device such as Blue Box were used by most women, they would have the possibility of having a screening test without pain, without an increased risk of cancer, without false positives and without long waits for results. Mammograms are recommended for women of a certain age, while Blue Box could be used by women of all ages.

A large-scale use of the Blue Box would mean a great change in the prevention of breast cancer, being able to diagnose cancers more and more early and in a simple way, and thus be able to treat them much earlier than at present. The fear of pain from the test and the worry that patients currently suffer would be eliminated.

The Blue Box consists of:

A urine reader based on a proprietary eNose (electronic nose) that captures the smell of urine. It contains a chemical sensor array that detects those breast cancer biomarkers present in urine that are small enough to become volatile when the sample is heated up.

An AI algorithm that takes the activation heatmap as an input and can assert if a subject has breast cancer. This is possible thanks to certain patterns that our AI can detect within the data.

The Blue Box would mean an improvement in the way this cancer is currently treated, and an advantage for both patients and the specialists who treat them.

The Blue Box won the Global James Dyson Award in 2020.