Israeli Designer Wins International Award For Medical Cannabis Potency Testing Device

A cannabis potency testing device sold by an Israeli medical cannabis startup and designed by an Israeli product designer won a prestigious international design award in recent weeks.

The device, created by Israeli product designer Eran Lederman for GemmaCert won the 2019 iF Design Award in the Medicine and Health category in Hamburg, Germany in March. Lederman is a senior lecturer in the Industrial Design Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and runs his own design studio focusing on medical devices, consumer products, light fixtures, and furniture.

Gemmacert and Lederman were among three winners in the same category.

The iF Design Award is a renown event held annually and organized by the iF International Forum Design GmbH. The forum vets over 6,000 submissions from some 50 countries and a jury panel of dozens of design experts selects the winners.

Lederman says the design for the device was “influenced by the Erlenmeyer flask,” in a description on GemmaCert’s website. “I was attracted to this because it is an archetypical, well-known image recognized as belonging in a laboratory, just like one from which GemmaCert’s technology evolved. The idea of filling this flask, not with chemicals or organic material, but with high technology and sensitive devices was captivating,” he says.

GemmaCert was co-founded in 2015 by Dr. Guy Setton and Prof. Oded Shoseyov, developing a home kit that is used to test the active ingredients content and cannabinoid levels of a flower bud. The device enables growers, dispensaries, labs, and home users to test and verify the composition and potency of an unlimited amount of flowers, without resorting to lab testing. Readings are then delivered to a proprietary smartphone application.

The company says it aimed to deliver “a smart solution for testing cannabis potency, simple and sleek, for everyday use requiring no specific skillset for operation, and whose form gave little indication to the sophistication of the technology working underneath.”