Every woman has a horrid period story they’re not willing to share.
One start-up is trying to alleviate that fear for women around their periods by developing a smart tampon that will alert the wearer to when it is almost full.
Sounds very sci-fi but it’s actually very simple. The user clips a Bluetooth sensor to the end of her tampon which feeds data back to an app. The user can then customise the app to let them know when the tampon is approaching its full capacity.
“Our aim is to empower women through insight and obliterate the period anxiety that plagues 50% of the world,” says founder Amanda Brief.
“The topic of menstruation, or as it’s known in many cultures, “the curse,” has always been treated as taboo. Virtually every woman can relate to stories of having whispered conversations in the bathroom, slipping their tampon discretely up their sleeve before running to the bathroom, staining their clothing on a monthly basis, and being too embarrassed to ask for a tampon.”
Amanda came up for the idea for My.Flow during a wearable’s project at Berkeley University.
“We at my.Flow are set on making the monthly cycle the next tracked biological phenomenon, following in the footsteps of the hundreds of smart devices that track sleep, diet, exercise, and every other bodily function you can think of. We are developing a tampon monitor that notifies you when your tampon is full and should thus be changed.”
“When the monitor senses full saturation, a notification will be sent to your phone via our Bluetooth-enabled belt clip, so that you never have to risk an accident or, even worse, infection, again. With this device, we also want to empower anyone experiencing a period with knowledge and confidence about their bodies, from the minute-ly to the monthly level, with the intention of changing the nature of the topic of the period,” she said
The tampons are excepted to arrive sometime in 2017. Don’t freak out if they’re late, it’s probably just stress or something.
