THE CB INNOVATION AWARDS

For the third year in a row, we're celebrating the companies that do business betterwith passion, purpose and a people-first outlook. Here are 25 disruptors setting the new standard.

- Lora Grady, Lana Hall, Andrew Joe Potter and Andrea Yu

In 2017, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas’s annual gizmo circus, tech entrepreneur Alex Qi watched a presentation for a biometric monitoring device that was unlike the heart-rate-tracking smartwatches already common at the time. Two wireless routers captured the heartbeat of an audience participant without any physical contact, instead using the same radio waves that Wi-Fi utilizes. He remembers Yihong Qi, a BlackBerry alum who was also attending the event, turning to him with a revelation: You could get even more detailed data using higher-frequency millimetre waves, or mmWaves, through a singular but more efficient sensor.

In 2021, the pair, along with health-tech entrepreneur Muxin Ma, officially co-founded Pontosense, with the aim of using mmWave technology to analyze environments, recognize patterns and offer actionable insights in a variety of settings. The applications of this technology could save lives on numerous fronts, they thought, from health care to vehicular safety to home security.

The underlying science is deceptively simple. Pontosense’s proprietary four-square-centimetre sensor emits high-frequency electromagnetic waves into the air. After bouncing off objects, those mmWaves reflect back onto the sensor, identifying micro-movements as subtle as a heartbeat with medical-grade accuracy from up to 15 metres away. Qi likens it to a bat’s echolocation—except Pontosense takes it to the next level. Using artificial intelligence and proprietary machine-learning tools, the company’s software is able to quickly isolate and remove unwanted noise from data—like a car’s vibrations when trying to measure the driver’s heartbeat—solving an issue that plagued previous iterations of mmWave tech.