New technology could predict hot flashes in menopausal women

Boston-based start-up Embr Labs and the University of Massachusetts Amherst are working on a new technology to predict hot flashes in menopausal women. 

Along with researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS), Embr Labs is developing a technology that has the ability to predict a menopausal hot flash before it occurs and mitigate it.

The team, the company says, has generated the largest data set of digital biomarkers for hot flashes ever collected and utilised machine learning to develop algorithms that can predict hot flashes.

“Hot flashes occur in 75 per cent of women and can persist for up to a decade,” says Matt Smith, co-founder and CTO of Embr Labs.

“We are proud to be developing effective tools for menopause, which has lacked new solutions for too long. By delivering automatic cooling for hot flash relief, we are realising the holy grail for natural hot flash management.”

Unlike previous attempts to combat hot flashes, this is a non-pharmaceutical approach. The current version of Embr Labs’ wearable device is worn on the inside of the wearer’s wrist and warms or cools at the touch of a button to elicit a brain and body response that can help resolve hot flashes.

The new predictive sensor technology, supported by grants from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center and the National Science Foundation, is hoped to be commercialised in an upcoming generation of Embr Wave.

“Seeking immediate cooling relief is a person’s natural reaction when they are having a hot flash,” explains Smith.

“We now have the know-how and technology to bring this solution into the 21st century: personalised and automatic hot flash management from a small, AI-powered, wearable device.”

Mike Busa, director of the UMass Amherst’s IALS Center for Human Health and Performance, says: “This technology is fundamentally different from most other wearable health technologies, such as activity trackers.

“This concept of automatic intervention based on real-time physiological symptoms is relatively unexplored. What has dominated the landscape up to this point is only tracking—letting you know the status of something or letting a care team know that a certain phenomenon has occurred.

“That technology most certainly has its strengths, but a major limitation is that it does not provide real-time, automated intervention to the person who is dealing with impactful symptoms.”

Instead, Busa describes the new system as a “reactive digital drug” for hot flash symptoms.

“The solution is not quite so simple as hot plus cold equals neutral,” he explains.

“In this case, we leverage early physiological changes that precede a person’s perception of an oncoming hot flash and provide early relief that aims to automatically deploy an intervention tailored to minimise the disturbance of the hot flash symptoms.”

“The device is communicating the data to servers and back to the device in a fraction of a second. That’s the power of data and cloud computing combined with the immediate cooling made possible by Embr Labs’ thermal technology,” he adds.

This is the second collaboration between Embr Labs and UMass Amherst.

Previously, Rebecca Spencer from the Sleep Monitoring Core at IALS and Department of Psychology conducted a pilot study which found that use of the Embr Wave was associated with improved sleep and reduction in self-reported frequency and intensity of hot flashes.