I-Corps: Wearable Medical Device for Menopause Management

这个I-Corps项目（NSF Lineage：奖励编号1644664）的更广泛的影响/商业潜力来自于开发一种可定制的症状管理工具，以支持经历更年期的妇女。对更年期的负面看法导致症状尴尬，导致健康素养不足和症状管理效率低下。 该项目的技术是一种可穿戴应用程序系统，通过提供在更年期期间通知和支持妇女的方法来解决这种低效率问题。拟议的I-Corps计划在项目最初的更年期症状管理应用重点中探索商业化机会，并调查在癌症症状管理和数据销售市场中的应用潜力。关于后者，未来的技术将收集大量数据，可用于简化生物技术和制药产品的开发。通过采用这项技术，妇女将能够更好地将她们的症状传达给一个更了解和理解的社会。I-Corps项目的前提是，利用个人移动的设备和用户数据可能会在医疗保健领域创造颠覆性创新。该项目的技术利用多个传感器来收集个性化数据，这些数据用于为用户提供多种方法来优化其更年期症状的管理，目的是最大限度地减少其对日常生活的负面影响。迄今为止，该项目的进展包括开发了一个用于测试硬件和软件组件可行性的alpha原型。目前的重点领域包括优化物理设计和数据采集能力。I-Corps流程将使我们更好地了解客户？未满足的需求以及我们的技术解决这些需求的能力。这将指导我们的技术开发，包括优化制造和功能增强，以满足客户发现的需求，并加速将有用的产品推向市场。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project (NSF Lineage: Award Number 1644664) is borne from the development of a customizable symptom management tool to support women experiencing menopause. The negative perception of menopause causes symptom embarrassment which leads to deficiencies in health literacy and inefficient symptom management. This project's technology, a wearable-app system, addresses this inefficiency by providing the means to inform and support women throughout menopause. The proposed I-Corps program explores commercialization opportunities within the project's initial application focus of menopause symptom management and also investigates the potential of applications in the cancer symptom management and data sales markets. With respect to the latter, the prospective technology will gather an abundance of data that may be used to streamline biotechnology and pharmaceutical product development. Through adoption of this technology, women will be able to better communicate their symptoms to a more aware and understanding society. This opens the door to future innovations in additional areas of healthcare that are traditionally not openly discussed.This I-Corps project is based on the premise that leveraging personal mobile devices and user data may create disruptive innovation in the healthcare space. The project's technology utilizes multiple sensors to collect personalized data which is used to provide the user with multiple ways to optimize management of her menopause symptoms, with the goal of minimizing their negative impact on her daily routine. Progress on the project to date includes development of an alpha prototype that has been used to test the feasibility of both hardware and software components. Current areas of focus include optimization of the physical design and data acquisition capability. The I-Corps process will allow us to improve our understanding of our customers? unmet needs and the ability of our technology to address them. This will guide the development of our technology, including optimization for manufacturing and feature enhancement, to address needs found in customer discovery and accelerate introduction of a useful product to market.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.