Women's Health, Products, Diagnosis
With the big $10M raised by DotLab last week, I took a deeper look at some of the interesting things happening in the women's health "Diagnostic" side of things. Although most of the products are still under development, here is just a taste of some of the startups in the field:
Bloomer Tech (MIT Technological Review): A wearable bra designed for women by women that has ECG technology embedded inside and allows for continuous monitoring. The Bloomer bra is currently under clinical trial and will be particularly useful for women with artial fibrillation. An app will give users and their care team access to their data. Bloomer Tech hopes to aggregate the data collected from willing users and partner with universities to help accelerate research focused on heart disease in women. Wow! Wearables for women at their best.
DotLab Raises $10M: Last Week DotLab announced that they raised $10M for a doctor ordered non-invasive diagnostic test for Endometriosis. Quite exciting, as until now endometriosis usually takes at least 7-10 visits to diagnose, and is generally diagnosed with a surgical procedure. See the trailer for the movie Endo What here.
Qurasense (Wired)- The Q-pad, is a menstrual pad with a built-in blood collection strip that it plans to sell for $25. Users can pull out the strip, and send it away to get test results (viewed from their app). The pad is currently under development and they are hoping to be able to detect biomarkers such as hormones, vitamins, minerals, HR-HPV, HIV, cholesterol, diabetes, cancer as well as other disease markers.
Higia (Tech Crunch): Higia is developing Eva, a bio-sensing bra that uses thermal sensing and AI to identify abnormal tempatures that can correlate to tumor growth. Users insert the cups into a sports bra for and hour, results are analyzed by the EVA app, and recommends further professional assessment if results are abnormal. Clinical trials at Stanford Medicine are expected to finish in the end of 2019.
NextGen Jane (Mobi Health News): I've previously written about them and their recent success in fundraising. NextGen Jane, is trying to develop a tampon that will be able to, among other things, test for Endometriosis.
Not quite diagnostic, but worth mentioning:
LoonCup (C|NET): No recent news, but LoonCup is developing a menstrual cup that let's you know when it's full. You'll get an alert at 50% full, at 70% full and as long as you don't go through airport security you should be good to go! They started with a kickstarter, hit a few bumps along the way, and are currently working on releasing their beta.
My.Flow (The Guardian): My.Flow is trying to develop a tampon that alerts you when it's full. It's still in development and as this article discusses, there are quite a few skeptics (higher price, not eco-friendly, promoting shame around periods).
If LoonCup and My.Flow get to market, women (and very importantly researchers) will be able to have actual data on changes in their menstrual flow. This can finally help more easily diagnose women with heavy uterine bleeding!