‘Smart tampon’ detects disease

An entrepreneur and a scientist teamed up on this.

Ridhi Tariyal and Stephen Gire, an entrepreneur and a scientist who met in an infectious disease lab at Harvard, were stunned by the vast number of women’s health issues that go undetected. It seemed clear to them that there was a problem with the way that medical testing worked in women’s health: the system is fundamentally reactive, waiting for illness to be detected before it springs into action. But when a positive test result comes back after an annual check-up, it could be too late.

“We had to come up with something that would allow women to find out about these conditions sooner than every year,” Tariyal says. “You can pick up a disease any time and letting it sit there for a year until your next visit can have consequences downstream that you don’t want. The system has to change.”

Together, Tariyal and Gire have been devising a radical new system of testing that will allow women to proactively keep track of their health by studying blood samples in the privacy of their homes. “I was thinking about how to get a large enough volume of blood to do this,” Tariyal says. “Until I realized that we actually bleed quite a bit every month.”

That’s when the lightbulb came on in Tariyal’s head: a tampon could double as a tool for collecting women’s blood. With the right technology, it could even test the blood for a range of biomarkers and send that information to a database that would allow a woman to track her reproductive health over time. It could be the most intimate wearable technology yet and a milestone in the development of the quantified self.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.