Many men don't realise that women have been "hacking their bodies" since the invention of the pill - thanks to chemistry advances, a lot of us just decide we don't want our period anymore, or choose when to have it. If you ask a bunch of women about the most important invention of the 20th century, the pill (and its modern friends such as the IUD, Depo Provera and implants) usually comes up first.
So since many western women are choosing when to have their periods and we do so often purely for reproductive reasons, such a tampon-analyser would sell very very well. We're already used to being grossed out by our blood by the time we want to reproduce so what's the harm in dropping a used tampon in a cylinder once a month, on top of everything else we do.
Actually, generalizing this, the idea of collecting regular samples from regular bodily excrement is fascinating.
Imagine a "lab in the toilet". Every time it is flushed, it runs analysis on the current contents and produces reports if requested, or alerts if needed.
"You're currently suffering potassium deficiencies, which can cause frequent headaches. Eat a banana to alleviate concerns."
Maybe I'm paranoid, but my concern with these things has always been that Facebook (or Google or some other personal data aggregator) would buy the company and suddenly my toilet would be calling home to their servers (à la Occulus Rift). I'm sure they'll find a way to make it need an internet connection.
Do these toilets seriously not function without internet access? I guess I could see the toilet being essentially a sensor array with some networking hardware; the decision-making about your fecal content would then be done in a datacenter.
As long as the stupid thing still flushes without internet access; I have never been more concerned about an IoT version of an existing appliance not doing its job. That is, I could stand an oven or blender not functioning; a toilet simply must work or the bathroom itself becomes nigh useless. "Honey, our toilet won't flush; are we still being DDoSed?"
As the article also talks of general patents applied for and awarded to women aside from patents related to the products to handle the menstrual cycle, the title could have been a little more general. Or does a title that explicitly refers to 'tampons' getter better readership?
My brother in law works for P&G in their tampon department as a researcher. He is a chemical engineer. He tells me most advances come from small startups outside the US and and they are usually quietly acquired. There seems to be a lot of red tape to get through before you can even do something small in that industry. It's not like you can throw some code and have a tampon 2.0 in a weekend. Tampons are a really complex thing. He explained to me how different types of fabrics and the way they are used can be potentially fatal ti some women. Thats why the research for the common tampon is ongoing.
Menstrual cups are safe when used as directed and no health risks related to their use have been found. However, no medical research was conducted to ensure that menstrual cups were safe prior to introduction on the market.
Kinda like how saccharine was discovered because a chemist had neglected to wash his hands after coming home from work, bit into a dinner roll, found it sweet, and then went around tasting everything in his laboratory until he found the sweet compound?
Makes me wonder how humanity ever discovered wine. "If you take grapes, squeeze the juice out of them, let it sit until its been colonized by a fungi, it'll develop a nerve poison that you should drink because it'll make you sick less often than water from that stream." To say nothing of beans, nutmeg, elderberry, or other foods that are poisonous when eaten raw.
I own a small vineyard. I can tell you without a doubt that the process of making wine is literally BEGGING to happen. The skin of the grape is covered with yeast cultures that are ready to ferment the sugar inside the grape. The second that there's a breaking of the skin (aka a deer comes by and grabs a snack), the process kicks off. After a couple of days, there's enough alcohol content in the grape that bees can hone in on the broken cluster (via smell or whatever). Get enough bees around, and they start eating more grapes, and voila. Bee-booze-chain-reaction. Ruined crop. RIP2015.
"Bloom has a lot of competition in the tampon subscription space. In September, Juniper launched for the high-end market with a discreet box of tampons, pads, pantyliners, and "indulgences" such as chocolate and tea for $28 a month. Then in November, My Cotton Bunny launched with a box of tampons or pads and a surprise gift for $13.75 a month. Le Parcel launched in January, offering a box of tampons, pads, chocolate, and a gift for $15 a month. There’s also Sent Her Way in California, Perfect Timing in New Jersey, and Trinkets in the UK."
I think spacehome is asking because Amazon already allows one to subscribe for tampons and other hygiene products, under their "Subscribe & Save" feature.
I don't know about disrupting the technology but there looks to be a lot of room to do things with distribution and product differentiation. Here is an Aussie startup http://tomorganic.com.au/
I very much doubt users — let alone physicians — would be making treatment decisions on the basis of an automated testing regime. In the event of abnormalities on an automated test, you'd see your doctor, discuss, and order repeat and/or follow-up testing to confirm, refute, or clarify.
Moreover, you'd also gain a very wide, data-rich baseline to compare subsequent results against, which would probably counter most of the over-diagnosis and allow for long-term trending of very important data.
It would, IMO, be wholly worth the risks you raise.
The problem is more subtle than simply doing a procedure based on faulty data - it's the invasive procedures done based on indication of a potential problem, often done to reduce risk without necessarily improving (and in fact, occasionally reducing) the health of the patient, simply because the patients discover they have some anomaly that may cause a real problem (like cancer) in the future, and they don't want to live in fear.
Your answer to "people are going to be over diagnosed and over treated" is "but they'll talk to their doctor" - but that already happens in the US and the massive over testing, over diagnosis and over treatment already causes great harm, and it's the doctors who are doing it.
I appreciate the systemic concern around these things but every time I see this response I see it as todays thinking applied to tomorrows world.
Right now, we have so few data points that we have little idea about the natural rhythms and variations of our body chemistry - just like how we have static imaging techniques but almost never any imaging of our bodies in motion. We have this really static view of all aspects of our bodies, coupled with 'normal' ranges that may not be our own normal. If we choose to do a bunch of tests on a perfectly healthy person, there's something bound to be outside normal. Applying todays thinking, that's a patient over-diagnosis problem as you say.
However, if we're gathering frequent data from lots of people, we'll be able to approach diagnosis differently. We'll have a new, deeper understanding of the variance in our bodies, and its unlikely one area of bloodwork getting outside normal range is going to cause alarm - we'll be used to this (and normal ranges themselves will change). These data might result in health care providers recommending some minor preventative medicine course-correction, but if the data gathering is frequent enough, we'll have much better ability to understand when something is truly problematic that requires expensive & risky treatment. In that respect, frequent testing can lead to less expensive/risky over-treatment than today's world of infrequent sampling, and more cheap/minor nutritional/activity/etc interventions backed by data.
I think the concern behind your statement is that the current system isn't going to be able to easily adapt to this new approach, and in the meantime there's going to be some over-diagnosis until the medical system can wrap its head around a new data-rich approach to things. The desire by patients to understand and optimize their health is going to be the driver here.
This is a great point. I'm hugely attracted to the quantified self stuff, but the fact it's not clear the outcomes of knowing all this data is net good, given our flawed selves.
Actually the strongest claims about the gender imbalance from the nytimes article are "And a 2006 study found that female academics in the life sciences — Ms. Tariyal’s field — were filing about 60 percent fewer patents than their male colleagues."
But when looking at the referenced research[1], the methodolgy is:" One possibility is that men and women do
qualitatively different kinds of research. In particular,
if women are risk averse in their research
choices (15), there may be a gender difference
in research Bpatentability.[ We believe such a
difference would manifest in the extent of
scholarly impact. To explore this possibility,
we created a data set of the 23,436 articles
published by the women in our sample and
matched each paper (by publication year) with
a randomly drawn article from the pool of male
scientists_ papers. This yields a sample of articles
with a 1:1 gender ratio. We then examined by gender and year, the average number
of citations and the journal impact factor (JIF) of
these papers. We found that the per-article mean
citation count for male scientists is very similar
to that of women (table S3). Moreover, the
gender gap in average JIF actually favors
women (average JIF for male: 4.06; average
JIF for female: 4.12). Overall, there is no
evidence that women do less important work
based on standard measures of scientific impact."
Which sounds like a way to measure the average quality of research(via mean), not for comparing the highest quality research by males and females, which is what counts for VC investments(and probably for patents) - and which should have high correlation to risk preference of males/females.
I'm not saying their claims aren't true, I'm just saying that they haven't presented any arguments or data in the article.
Edit: Haha, I didn't realize my original comment was flagged. I guess I was wrong to call it "bullshit", I should have called it "propaganda". But probably even that would be to "politically incorrect" (or "inconvenient") to be acceptable here...
And RE: the edit I just noticed that you made, you appear to have confused "propaganda" and "politically incorrect" with "factually correct".
A claim was made and backed up with data-driven scientific study and you still aren't able to perceive it as anything other than propaganda? I feel sorry for you.
It's a reasonable post that makes points I, frankly, am not qualified to judge, so I will not try to.
Your post stated that the author had provided no argument nor data, when it did exactly that. I am able to judge the existence or non-existence of text, so I replied.
No, "bullshit" was meant only for the way those claims were presented in the article. I didn't really see how they were relevant to the rest of the content (and to the title). It seemed like somebody thought "Oh, we could slip some feminist propaganda in here!"
Ugh, is every medical startup with female founders going to fall into this "Theranos" semantic frame now, with all the crappy assumptions about viability and research integrity that entails?
A medical startup with a female founder that claims to be able to replace standard blood tests with a less invasive solution, accompanied by overly credible media coverage that claims the only reason the medical industry isn't doing it already is its own incompetence and fails to mention the fact that the fluid they're collecting is actually rather different from normal venous blood and likely isn't suitable as a substitute for it? Sounds a lot like Theranos to me.
So since many western women are choosing when to have their periods and we do so often purely for reproductive reasons, such a tampon-analyser would sell very very well. We're already used to being grossed out by our blood by the time we want to reproduce so what's the harm in dropping a used tampon in a cylinder once a month, on top of everything else we do.