Whether it’s your first pregnancy or your 20th, the third trimester is a time of watchful waiting and anticipation. Anything that can provide accurate and helpful information about pregnancy-specific parameters, especially contractions, is reassuring and empowering. Bloomlife‘s eponymous pregnancy wearable is now available to inform and help bring peace of mind to expecting moms.
Bloomlife has been in beta testing with hundreds of women and the subject of four clinical studies for nine months. The device is taped to the mom’s abdomen during the third trimester of pregnancy and data is transmitted to Android and iOS smartphone apps. Data visualized on the smartphone provides a real-time contraction view, automated contraction counting and timing, and contraction pattern and trend information so women can understand what’s happening, gain a sense of how their bodies are preparing for labor, and easily provide accurate information to their birth team.
Rather than moms counting and timing contractions on their own or with a partner, mundane tasks that can nonetheless be confusing and even irritating during and between contractions, the Bloomlife sensor picks up electrical signals directly from the uterine muscle. The sensor counts, times, and measures the strength of both Braxton Hicks and labor contractions. With the information gathered during the third trimester from the comfort of home via the wearable, moms can see the contraction pattern changes to better understand them herself and to share them with family, friends, and her pregnancy care team.
According to CEO and co-founder Eric Dy, Bloomlife intends to crowdsource data to improve birth outcomes by building “the largest and most comprehensive data set on maternal and fetal health parameters to identify biomarkers for pregnancy complications.”
“Despite one in eight women delivering preterm, the underlying causes and triggers of preterm birth are poorly understood,” says Dy. “Traditional approaches to clinical research are fraught with red tape when it comes to pregnancy. Naturally, anything that is perceived to risk a mother and her baby remains strictly off limits.
“Bloomlife has developed a better way to move beyond the clunky inconvenient 40-year-old technology that is used in hospitals today that requires strapping women to beds. In doing so, we improve the overall usability, and, since we don’t use ultrasound, allow for longitudinal recordings necessary to collect the missing data to advance our understanding of pregnancy and complications such as preterm birth. We see an opportunity to revolutionize medical discovery and innovation, leveraging the power of citizen science and crowdsourced consumer-generated data, which is particularly needed in underserved areas such as pregnancy.”
Bloomlife is available for order on the company website priced at $150 for 1 month, $250 for 2 months, and $300 for 3 months. Orders are expected to start shipping the last week in January.
