Your Tampon Could Save Your Life

Did you know that 75 percent of hygiene products for women are designed by men? The solution? The “smart tampon”, designed by a woman.

Ridhi Tariyal, founder of NextGen Jane, has developed the easiest method ever invented to give a medical blood sample, without a needle and a nurse — by extracting menstrual blood from tampons. Ridhi’s invention was fueled by her own desire to monitor her fertility. These tests require significant amounts of blood at regular intervals. Ridhi was trying to figure out “how to get a large enough volume of blood to do this”, until she had her aha-moment: When do women produce large amounts of blood regularly? When they have their period! “Every month we throw all this valuable information into the trash,” Ridhi realized and set out to change that.

Since the first trials were successful, Ridhi is expanding her tests. Obviously, fertility is more than a hormone status. “40 percent of women who go into IVF clinics have undiagnosed endometriosis, so when they present themselves at the fertility clinic, it`s often too late,” Ridhi knows. “There are so many startups now that are focused on short-term fertility, e.g. period tracking apps, but what we`re concerned about are issues that women are delaying childbirth further and further. STDs, cancer, etc. are all part of the issue. Someone has to do fertility management on a much larger scale.”

Her next trial will focus on endometriosis, an often painful condition that befalls 10 percent of women globally. On average it takes a woman in the US 7 to 10 years until she finds out she has the disease. Ridhi Tariyal hopes to change that, but this is also a story about her pitching the smart tampon to mostly male investors. Some of them have told her that her invention “only benefits half the population” and asked if she couldn’t invent something that helps men instead. Luckily, she persisted. And now her invention is well on its way to revolutionizing health care for women.