For changing the way we see our brains. Imagine your brain as a network of city streets, says ElMindA CEO Ronen Gadot. MRIs show us the roadways, but not the traffic. ElMindA’s device, however, can observe the effect of billions of neurons that fire when you think, talk, and breathe. It uses up to 256 electrodes and sits on the head like a hairnet, monitoring how brain networks respond to one another to help treat such conditions as PTSD and memory loss. “If there’s a traffic jam,” Gadot says, “we can detect it and find better interventions to open up those clogs.” The technology, approved last July by the FDA, could eventually help the 2 billion people living with brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ADHD. For example, researchers may, for the first time, see how the brain responds to a drug versus a placebo. “The more we can see,” Gadot says, “the more we can affect functionality.” READ MORE

For discovering errors in the prescribing of drugs. An estimated eight million times a year, errors in U.S. drug prescriptions can have life-threatening consequences. This is occurring even as the method of prescribing is shifting from handwritten to electronic. MedAware’s Prescription Analysis and Alert System analyzes the prescription a health care provider enters, compares it to the patient’s records and to other patients with the same condition, analyzes the provider’s prescribing patterns, and approves the prescription within seconds or flags it. The goal: to prevent errors that derive from a drug’s name or a patient’s name being similar to the intended one, or that greatly deviate from the norm. The market: hospitals, health insurance companies, pharmacy chains, and primary care physicians. “It’s unacceptable that anyone dies because of the click of a button,” says MedAware’s cofounder and CEO, Gidi Stein. Ninety percent of the prescriptions that MedAware flags, he says, “are true alerts.”

For vehicular collision-avoidance technology. That cute Super Bowl XLVIII commercial of a dad rescuing his son from various close calls from toddler to teenager, only for the distracted boy, now driving, to screech to avoid an apparent accident? It was for an automobile company, but may as well have been for Mobileye. The Jerusalem company seems to launch annual innovations to its foundational product of mounted cameras that take in the surroundings, detect possible dangers, and automatically brake the vehicle when necessary. And its auto partners include Tesla, GM, Audi, and BMW. Its upcoming innovation centers on autonomous driving—meaning, the person behind the wheel becomes solely a passenger under cruise-control conditions, with the car guiding itself along a highway. “Drivers” could thus read a book or text to their hearts’ content. Also in the works: autonomous-driving capabilities for city streets and country roads.

For marching wearable robots into the home. This past June, the ReWalk Personal System became the first exoskeleton to be cleared by the FDA for use at home and in the community. No longer stuck in laboratories or rehab facilities, these robotic devices can now help users move about the world, restoring some of the lower-limb mobility lost to injury or disease. ReWalk Robotics’ model essentially walks for its wearer, balancing and adjusting its gait as it steps forward, and proving a first glimpse of a future where exoskeletons are as commonplace as wheelchairs.

For bringing freight into the 21st century. Shipping is one of the world’s oldest global industries, but it remains as vital as ever. It’s also plenty complicated, necessitating untold numbers of ships, planes, and trucks to deliver items from seller to buyer across borders. (The United States itself annually exports approximately $2.27 trillion in goods, with $2.7 trillion imported.) Yet a freight forwarder—similar to a travel agent, making all the arrangements for transport and delivery—often requires a week to provide a client with a price quote. Freightos uploads forwarders’ contracts, specifications, and factors like gasoline prices to produce instantly generated price quotes for the forwarder to provide its customers, the sellers. Freightos’ clients include such giants as Ceva Logistics and Apex Logistics; for one client, Kestrel, Freightos estimates having saved it $150,000 annually in labor costs and, within 60 days, more than quadrupling its monthly average of quotes generated.

For identifying breaches of credit-card security. Remember the December 2013 breach of Target’s database that compromised the credit-card information of approximately 40 million consumers? Thousands of those people were first alerted to the breach because they’re BillGuard customers. Akin to a bank asking a customer to verify the authenticity of suspicious charges, BillGuard’s new data-breach feature detects patterns that could mean that the person’s credit-card number was stolen. Card holders registered with BillGuard are notified of such breaches faster, by a new app, much like the company’s precursor, an app that detects unauthorized “gray” charges such as the free magazine subscriptions that morphed into paid ones. Today, approximately 800,000 people use BillGuard’s data-breach app. Since the Target breach, BillGuard has alerted such clients as Neiman Marcus, AT&T, and California’s Department of Motor Vehicles of credit-card breaches that had resulted in $1.5 million in fraudulent charges.

For matching video to text. Keeping a potential customer’s eyes on a web page is the aim of every e-commerce seller. WebyClip’s algorithm does that by finding the most appropriate, publicly available video clip (such as on YouTube), and importing it onto the e-commerce page being viewed. Someone reading up on a digital camera, say, will also see an accompanying video tutorial on the camera’s features. Such “targeted video optimization” aims to increase sales and reduce returns by helping a customer select the right item in the first place. Most of the company’s 20,000 clients (totaling 2 million video views daily) are those selling on eBay, and, indeed, eBay itself is a WebyClip client. “Even just to get one video means heavy, heavy lifting—but we provide the video to turn you from a shopper into a buyer,” says company CEO Ariel Shemesh. Clients’ sales are up an average of 12 percent, shoppers’ time on a page is up 90 percent, and 30 million videos were viewed in the first half of 2014, he adds.