A smart bra for better heart health | Alicia Chong Rodriguez

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2021

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Could an everyday clothing item help protect your health? In this quick talk, TED Fellow Alicia Chong Rodriguez introduces us to a smart bra designed to gather real-time data on biomarkers like heartbeat, breath and temperature. Learn how this life-saving gadget could help close the gender gap in cardiovascular research -- and, finally, usher women’s health care into the 21st century.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. What if something most women wear every day could be a lifesaver?
0:10.4	In her talk from Ted Monterey 2021, healthcare technology entrepreneur Alicia Chong Rodriguez introduces us to an undergarment innovation that could collect life-saving data and link us to the exact
0:22.9	therapies we need in the moment of a health crisis. It's pretty cool. I am proudly named Alicia
0:31.3	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.
0:40.3	We lost her to a heart attack when I was 13 years old.
0:44.3	When one of my co-founders, Monica, was 12,
0:48.3	she was waiting at school for her mom to pick her up.
0:51.3	Only that didn't happen, because her mom, a 44-year-old physician,
0:59.5	had suddenly passed away from a stroke. Unfortunately, our stories are common. Her disease
1:06.9	and stroke are the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. And for women, it is
1:14.4	not only harder to recognize, diagnose, and treat, but after a heart attack or a stroke,
1:21.5	women also face higher mortality. There are about 44 million women living in the U.S. with heart disease, and the incidences for women under 65 are on a rise.
1:35.1	So what's going on?
1:37.3	The answer lies at the intersection of two areas, data and medical devices.
1:49.5	Let's look at data first 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
1:57.1	one of the largest subgroups underrepresented was eye-opening. In fact, women were one of the largest subgroups underrepresented was eye-opening. In fact, women were
2:05.1	basically excluded from cardiovascular clinical trials until the NIH mandated inclusion in 1993.
2:14.3	This is why existing technologies and therapies often fall short,
2:20.0	because most of them have been designed using data primarily from male animals and men.
2:26.7	And as artificial intelligence helps turbocharge digital health,
2:31.7	there's a danger that algorithms mostly trained with male data and biases
2:38.1	will actually perpetuate the problem.
	...

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