00:00First of all, I'm curious how all of this, get into your background a little bit and how this all
00:04came up on your radar when it comes to underdiagnosed or delayed diagnosis in women when it comes to heart
00:11disease and how it kind of led you to where you are today.
00:15Yes, no, thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be here to share about this.
00:20Well, this all started because sharing a bit about my background, I am proudly named Alicia after my grandma.
00:28She dedicated her life to women's health as an obstetrician, and we lost her to a heart attack when I
00:34was 13 years old.
00:36It was sudden, without warnings, and we didn't really talk about it.
00:40It was until years later when I was at MIT's computational cardiovascular research group that I realized how common her
00:47story really is, which is all of the statistics you just shared.
00:51Heart disease is the number one killer of women worldwide, and it has been historically overlooked.
00:58At MIT, we had access to some of the largest data sets used today for clinical decision making, and they
01:05were mainly composed of male cohorts.
01:07One in every four clinical trial participants were female, and that's when it really clicked for me that there's a
01:14data gap.
01:15And as artificial intelligence helps turbocharge digital health, there's actually a danger that these algorithms that are trained with mostly
01:23male data sets will actually perpetuate these problems.
01:27And we also saw the exciting opportunity because, you know, AI thrives on patterns, and women's lives are full of
01:34them from our menstrual cycles to pregnancies to menopause.
01:37Women's physiology is dynamic, and we've been historically ignoring them.
01:44So we did start this thinking that for every woman that symptoms have been dismissed, that the data was missing
01:53or unrecognized, and now her heart story can be rewritten through science and technology and understanding.
01:59So how are you doing it at Bloomer Tech?
02:03What is the technology that you're using?
02:04How are you harnessing the data and using AI right now in a way to try to prevent this from
02:10happening?
02:12Yes, so we started by building a device that was, since its inception, thinking about how to better collect data
02:21from female physiology, right?
02:23So we designed it in a wearable form factor that it looks and feels like an everyday bra.
02:30It can be a nursing bra, a tank top to sleep, or just a regular everyday bra or a sports
02:36bra.
02:36And it has all of these sensors all around her torso, looking at her heart, lungs, hormones, metabolism, right?
02:44Because we wanted to optimize how we are collecting data from a woman.
02:51So tell us about-
02:52We call it the Bloomer tag, which is the acronym for Tech Augmented Garment.
02:57Yeah, fascinating.
02:58We're showing, for those who are listening on radio, of course, can't see the pictures, but showing some images of
03:02what you guys are doing.
03:03You're in the testing phase.
03:06So tell us about kind of what you have found out, how accurate it is, how useful it is.
03:13Data for data, you know, alone is not necessarily helpful, but give us an idea of what you're finding as
03:22you go through the test phase.
03:23Yeah, I always think that the data for data alone is noise, right?
03:28Like, we really want data to understand what's going on.
03:32And like you said at the beginning, because women are having worse outcomes compared to men her same age after
03:40a cardiac episode,
03:41we really needed to see how we look at these female patterns and what are we really striving for.
03:48So when we built this device, we've taken the device through clinical validation.
03:52So we've done clinical studies so that we can prove the medical grade quality of our sensors because they're all
03:58textile based.
04:00And for us, it's more about generating digital biomarkers that understand female physiology with all of the accumulated evidence that
04:09we've had over the last 30 years on how heart disease presents differently in women.
04:14So amazing work from cardiologists and researchers has demonstrated that most of the modern cardiology today is focused on blockages
04:27in larger arteries.
04:28Right.
04:28But the reality is that women have heart disease in the smaller vessels.
04:33So all of these patterns, understanding them really well and being able to use a cardiac monitor that is comfortable,
04:41continuous to identify these patterns is, for us, it's really important because we can change the way that we deliver
04:52care today in finding these conditions at an earlier stage.
04:57And not when the disease has become so severe that now you're ineligible for certain therapies that you wouldn't, you
05:04would have been eligible if you find them earlier.
05:07I want to ask you, we've got a couple of minutes left here, but is this something that the FDA
05:12signs off on?
05:14And I'm just curious, and is it something that, so that healthcare plans will pay for this, that doctors respect
05:21the data that comes in?
05:22Walk us through that, because that's something that really speaks to viability, right, in terms of as a healthcare tool.
05:27Yeah, so we make it to be like a halter monitor.
05:30So it's more on that stream of a medical device with the reality that, unlike the halter monitor, right, like
05:42a patient can be seen because it has the ability to collect data from the reports and that give more
05:51information to the cardiologist so that they can provide better standpoints and logs about what's actually going on,
05:59and what her symptoms are when she's feeling a chest pain or any other symptoms.
06:04Does the healthcare community, do doctors, do medical professionals respect the data that comes in?
06:10That's what I'm just curious about, what you're hearing about.
06:11Yeah, so that's why we've done clinical studies, so to prove the clinical validation so that they see that this
06:17is equivalent to any other medical-grade technology.
06:21And at the same time, we're very focused on demonstrating all of the evidence on our digital biomarker pipeline.
06:27I know because everybody's probably thinking, I'm thinking in my control room, what was something like this cost?
06:32We've only got about 30 seconds.
06:35So this is very similar to when you would get a halter monitor at the doctor's office.
06:41Which costs what?
06:42I have no idea.
06:43What do those things cost?
06:44Insurance pays for it.
06:46Yeah, insurance pays for it, and it depends on the state.
06:49Okay.
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