Wearable technology that measures people’s physiological data has gotten quite small over the past decade — with some devices now the size of a mere ring or a watch. That’s not an unequivocally good thing, though, according to one founder in the medical device world.
“When you make something tiny, it might be more comfortable than what we used in the past, but then you also have the trade-off of what it can do — how much data it can collect, the resolution of the data that it can collect, and how it performs,” said Alicia Chong Rodriguez, co-founder and CEO of Bloomer Tech, during an interview this month at the Heart Rhythm Society’s recent HRX conference in Atlanta.
Bloomer isn’t concerned with making its technology small — instead it focused its product design on the adhering to the torso, the part of the body best-suited to collect cardiovascular data, she remarked. The Boston-based startup has developed a wearable electrocardiogram device designed to look and feel like a bra.
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The company — named after Amelia Bloomer, a women’s rights advocate from the 1800s — seeks to improve heart disease treatment and prevention among women. It was launched in 2018 shortly after Chong Rodriguez and her co-founder — Aceil Halaby, who serves as Bloomer’s COO — finished their Master’s studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The pair met in MIT’s computational cardiovascular research lab, where they had access to huge amounts of data. They noticed that most of that data came from male patients, Chong Rodriguez said.
“This made us ask questions like, ‘How is this going to impact female patients? How will these AI models perform for women? Or will they perpetrate the problems that we’re already seeing?’ Women have worse outcomes today compared to men,” she noted.
Oftentimes, women don’t receive heart disease diagnoses until it’s too late to prevent severe outcomes, Chong Rodriguez pointed out.
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Bloomer’s bra allows patients to have sensors all around their torso in a way they don’t notice, she explained. It collects data on a woman’s heart function, lungs, hormones and metabolism, ultimately seeking to help detect heart irregularities and other biomarkers that can lead to heart disease and negative outcomes.
“We’ve tried to build it in a way where it integrates seamlessly into her everyday life. If she can actually do her daily activities with it, we can actually capture real-world data,” Chong Rodriguez declared.
Because there are sensors all over the bra, Bloomer is able to collect “more data than the typical device,” she said.
Bloomer is going after the prescription model, she added. The startup wants the bra to be a prescribed device for women who are diagnosed with or at risk for heart disease.
Earlier this year, the startup announced plans to conduct a clinical trial testing the bra.
Photo: ismagilov, Getty Images