Engineering a Better Tampon

From Garnet News:

"A small group of inventors and funders are deciding the future for us right now, and if that group is homogeneous, then so too is our future. So says, Ridhi Tariyal, an engineer and inventor of a patented method capturing menstrual blood and using it to diagnose all kinds of women’s health issues, including endometriosis, reports Pagan Kennedy.

A more complete article in the New York Times today by Pagan Kennedy - The Tampon of the Future:

"In 2013, Tariyal was a life-sciences entrepreneurship fellow at Harvard Business School, a position that came with a robust network and a host of connections to investors. Still, she and her business partner Stephen Gire discovered had a hard time raising money for a women’s-health technology. Tariyal says there are many more possibilities in women’s-health technology that are still unexplored, “because for so long, women have not had the power to push forward their ideas.”"

In 2014, an engineer at Harvard named Ridhi Tariyal hit on a far simpler workaround. “I was trying to develop a way for women to monitor their own fertility at home,” she told me, and “those kinds of diagnostic tests require a lot of blood. So I was thinking about women and blood. When you put those words together, it becomes obvious. We have an opportunity every single month to collect blood from women, without needles.” 

Together with her business partner, Stephen Gire, she has patented a method for capturing menstrual flow and transforming it into medical samples. “There’s lots of information in there,” Ms. Tariyal said, “but right now, it’s all going in the trash.”

Why did Ms. Tariyal see a possibility that had eluded so many engineers before her? You might say she has an unfair advantage: her gender.

Because she lives in a female body, she had experiences that just wouldn’t be available to her male colleagues. She doesn’t have to imagine using her device, because she herself has been able to beta-test it."