Alicia Chong Rodriguez A smart bra for better heart health TED
I am proudly named Alicia
after my grandma.
She dedicated her life
to women’s health as an obstetrician,
in a time when women were rarely allowed
to obtain medical degrees.
We lost her to a heart attack
when I was 13 years old.
When one of my cofounders, Monica, was 12,
she was waiting at school
for her mom to pick her up.
Only that didn’t happen,
because her mom, a 44-year-old physician,
had suddenly passed away from a stroke.
Unfortunately, our stories are common.
Heart disease and stroke
are the leading causes of death
and disability worldwide.
And for women,
it is not only harder to recognize,
diagnose and treat,
but after a heart attack or a stroke,
women also face higher mortality.
There are about 44 million women
living in the US with heart disease,
and the incidences for women
under 65 are on the rise.
So what’s going on?
The answer lies at the intersection
of two areas: data and medical devices.
Let’s look at data first,
or the lack of it.
When I was doing
cardiovascular research at MIT,
I had access to huge data sets.
Realizing that women were one
of the largest subgroups underrepresented
was eye-opening.
In fact, women were basically excluded
from cardiovascular clinical trials
until the NIH mandated inclusion in 1993.
This is why existing technologies
and therapies often fall short,
because most of them have been designed
using data primarily
from male animals and men.
And as artificial intelligence
helps turbocharge digital health,
there’s a danger that algorithms
mostly trained with male data and biases
will actually perpetuate the problem.
Next, let’s look at medical devices.
The “one type fits all” approach
doesn’t even take into account the fact
that heart disease and stroke
can present differently in women.
Way too often, female thresholds
are not programmed.
Smaller arteries cannot be visualized,
and poor clinical-grade monitoring systems
cannot accommodate
two different body shapes
or stages in life.
In the 1800s, Amelia Bloomer
led a movement against damaging corsets,
towards more comfortable
and useful garments for women.
She inspired us to think:
What if we could solve both the data
and the device challenge
by using a garment
that most women already wear daily?
What if a garment
designed to support women
could also augment their health?
Our idea is to turn the everyday bra
into an actual lifesaver.
And this is how we’re doing it.
This is our augmented garment platform.
It gives women the ability
to continuously and remotely
acquire physiological data.
By wearing these bras,
women can view insights and patterns
and keep an automated
journal in their phones,
giving them a simple way to tag symptoms
and collect life-saving data
to share with their doctors
for early detection
and targeted management.
It can even track the safety
and efficacy of certain therapies.
We’ve built medical-grade textile sensors
that can adapt to multiple
bra styles and sizes
for continuous, reliable
and repeatable data,
all around her torso and her heart.
We can track heart rhythm, breathing,
temperature, posture and movement,
and by applying algorithms,
we can use this data to decode symptoms,
articulate arrhythmia triggers
and generate personalized
digital biomarkers.
Unlike traditional biomarkers, like blood,
that take a snapshot in time,
digital biomarkers work more like a video,
using data collected over time
to explain, influence
and even predict health outcomes.
They have the potential
to enable care immediately.
No more wait time for results.
She has the data available
when she needs it the most.
With medical-grade technology
as easy as wearing a bra,
we could catch up, close the data gap,
enable easier participation
in clinical trials
and bring women’s health care
into the 21st century.
The more women that wear
these augmented bras,
the faster we can create
a truly meaningful and inclusive data set
on women’s health.
Collectively, this data
can enable breakthroughs
in digital diagnostics and therapeutics
to solve some of the biggest
health-care challenges
humanity faces today.
With our unique biological data,
our ability to gather more and more of it
and our ability to learn from it using AI,
the dream of making medicine
without bias and truly personal
can be achieved.
And that, of course, benefits all of us.
Thank you.
(Cheers and applause)