Openwater is revolutionising healthcare by replacing million-dollar MRI machines with portable, $1,000 devices. Using non-invasive Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (LIFU), the company is achieving early success treating cancer, stroke, and mental illness – making powerful therapies dramatically more affordable and accessible.

The Openwater system includes two breakthrough devices. The first one is the Open-Motion: A real-time diagnostic tool that uses laser light and holography to track blood flow, oxygenation, and micro-movements deep within the body. Its flexible, modular design adapts to different medical uses – like stroke detection or heart monitoring – bringing fast, high-resolution insights to the point of care. The second one is the Open-LIFU: A non-invasive therapy system that targets disease with focused ultrasound. Its AI-driven, modular design adapts treatments in real time, offering safer and more cost-effective alternatives to drugs or surgery.

Both are modular, AI-integrated, and designed for rapid reconfiguration, offering high-resolution, personalised treatment at the point of care. By combining advanced software, hardware, and machine learning, Openwater enables medical innovation at the pace of consumer electronics.

The design philosophy behind Openwater centres on humanising healthcare, aiming to deliver reassurance, trust, and simplicity during a patient’s most vulnerable moments. The system is both modular and configurable to adapt depending on treatment needs, with anywhere between 1-6 modules needed for the ultrasound to penetrate the correct cell/s. The modular design also allows multiple configurations for different medical applications such as stroke detection, cardiovascular monitoring, and neurological assessments optimised for specific medical needs that are efficient, low-cost, and portable.

Both approachable and precise, the aesthetic simplicity fosters comfort and trust. User-adaptive designs, such as the intuitive, configurable strap systems, ensure a personalised experience. Open-LIFUs functional dot matrix fiduciary pattern provides reliable precision while retaining a minimal aesthetic, paired with a soothing colour palette based on tonal shifts promotes calm and confidence.

Openwater sees the landscape of medical device development as a tough and expensive one: where each developer usually creates their own hardware and software and manufacturing supply chain and which typically goes to just one medical indication. Openwater is taking a different approach: manufacturers, developers, and researchers stand to gain substantial benefits from the proactive sharing of architectures and safety data, while achieving higher production volumes.

By sharing R&D within the Open Source community, Openwater fosters rapid innovation and collaboration, significantly reducing costs and time to market for new medical devices. This shift from expensive, inaccessible diagnostic tools to portable, AI-powered solutions will democratise healthcare worldwide, making non-invasive, highly effective treatments the new standard of care.

The results are profound: an 85% reduction in development costs and a compressed time-to-market from 10 years to just 2.5. By opening up the development pipeline, Openwater is catalysing a global shift from expensive equipment to intelligent, portable, and scalable medical solutions.

Founded in 2016 by Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen, Openwater is reshaping the future of diagnostics and treatment.The platform is already delivering real-world clinical impact, having achieved record sensitivity and specificity in detecting LVO stroke in 151 patients at UPenn and Brown University. It has also successfully treated severe depression in a 20-person clinical trial by targeting misfiring neurons and has selectively destroyed aggressive cancer cells while preserving healthy tissue in Glioblastoma patients.

With R&D kits starting at $10,000 and a $1,000 target price for hospitals and clinics, Openwater is making life-saving care more available, more precise, and more equitable.

Category:MedicalAward Year:2025Designers:Nichole Rouillac, David Roseberry, Justin Mamaril,. Marion Decroix, Elliot Quasha | level, San Francisco, CaliforniaManufacturer:Openwater | San Francisco, California