The Future of Women's Health Begins at MIT

For 40 years, the MIT Media Lab has been an interdisciplinary creative sandbox where innovation thrives at the intersection of art, science, engineering, and design. Grounded in academic excellence, the Lab brings together diverse students, faculty, and researchers collaborating across dozens of groups, centers, initiatives, and programs on transformative projects. Through its unique consortium model, the Lab collaborates with industry, nonprofits, governments, philanthropic organizations, and global communities to develop technologies and experiences that enable people everywhere to flourish.

Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., a Grover M. Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the MIT Media Lab, discusses the technological advancements in wearable medical devices and their impact on women’s health. Dr. Picard speaks with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio. Let's get to the Business
Week Women's Health segment, where we focus on key issues
and developing technologies impacting the president and future of women's
health around the world. We've got with us Roselind Picard,
Doctor of Science, Grover M. Hermann, Professor of Health Sciences
and Technology at the MIT Media App, also Director of

(00:31):
Effective Computing Research. He joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Effective computing,
What is it?

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hi, It's such a pleasure to be here with you.
Effective computing with an A is defined as computing that
relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Wait okay, so wait walk us through that. So it's
in news today and how is it?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
You know?

Speaker 3 (00:53):
What is it? Enabling us to do lots of things.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
It's an area started here at the MIT Media App
decades ago, and initially it was about giving computers the
skills of emotional intelligence. Then we started learning that a
lot of people could use better understanding about emotion. Also
working with many people who had difficulty understanding others emotions
as well as their own. We started building wearable technologies

(01:16):
that could monitor physiological changes in our body even when
we were leaving the lab, not just here hooked up
to racks of equipment.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Then those physicological changes were documented, obviously for research, but
in terms of helping others understand what a person is
feeling or experiencing. How does that work?

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, So, obviously emotions are very personal and very private,
so we don't do any of that sharing of it
without people's fully informed prior consent. However, there are a
lot of times when people are confused about their own feelings.
For example, a person's heart may be racing, and they
may think that they have a cardiac condition, but in
fact it may be their fear of a cardiac condition

(01:57):
that is causing the heart to race. So the wearables
let you collect data in the real world. In fact,
we built some of the first wearables here in the
Media Lab, at least the first ones I know of
that could monitor the cardiac information and the autonomic nervous
system information like your flight fight or flight response.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
So walk us through, because this is, as you said,
wearable computers that am I to You've been working on
this for over two decades. Walk us through a little
bit of kind of where you guys, or how you
were thinking about it a couple of decades ago, versus
kind of where we are today and the progress you've
made and how it's evolved in terms of what wearables
can do when it comes to really assessing our health.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
In the beginning, we were interested in emotions that could
help make people's experiences better. Say, in a learning experience,
is the learner frustrated or bored? Or usability? Is this
software driving users crazy? Or is it a great experience?
And automobile driving too, is this situation on the streets

(03:00):
stressing out people? Could we change the situation and have
lower drivers stress. So we started by building wired systems
that could leave the lab, and then later we built
versions with small wireless sensors that could go on jewelry
and in risks. We built the first risk watch that
could monitor simultaneously signals like electrodermal activity and PPG, the

(03:25):
photoplus esography that's used to extract heart rate today, and
also you mentioned the Apple thing. We built some of
the first earbuds that actually worked with an iPhone that
measured heart rate with consumer quality data and publish that
I believe it was back in two thousand and nine.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Well, you know, I love what you are talking about,
and I think about as a woman, as a mother
of a daughter that when it comes to women's health specifically,
I feel like there is a lot that's not paid
attention to. And obviously there's been studies and research that
really bear this out. So I'm curious about how technology
or wearables can improve the health and health outcome and

(04:06):
knowledge an assessment when it comes to women specifically.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Thanks for asking about that. Women have definitely been left
out of a lot of health studies. I learned that
it's less than ten years ago that the National Institute
of Health started even requiring scientists to include female mice
and rats in their studies. Before they were sticking with
just the males to avoid the complexity of the female system.

(04:30):
The opportunities are huge for health with wearables, and especially
for women's health. There are so many conditions that are
different for women than for men, and they're not only
vastly understudied, but the kind of data is very undersampled.
It's like asking somebody what they feel or what they
experience instead of actually counting the way that the pain

(04:55):
each month is affecting their life or the way that
the disruptions that not are affecting their sleep. And now
we can do those kinds of measurements with wearables.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
So what is the right technology in your view, that
people and specifically women need to adopt in order to
have this better understanding.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
Well, I'm not going to be promoting a particular product
here today. At the Media lab Our job is to
make possible those future things. We're building the things that
are pre product that are in some cases decades ahead
of what will be out there. Sometimes we're also using
commercial systems to gather data. So one example of that

(05:34):
is we use a smartwatch that collects autonomic data and
movement data, and we're looking at the structure of what
is enabling people to sleep better. Sleep is such a
huge problem and it affects women differently than men, and
we need to help people fix it.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
So let me ask this question in a different way,
which is when you look out at the products that
are available with the context of what you've been working
on for years at the MIT Media lab what has
been harnessed and sort of what is still in the pipeline.
What is still being research? Like what percentage of the
opportunity that you think is out there has actually been

(06:12):
achieved with the products that are on the market right now.
Where are we in that timeline?

Speaker 1 (06:16):
Oh, probably about one percent of it? SPINSI there's so
much more we can do. Yeah, there's a huge amount
of stuff happening here that is not out there yet,
as you saw, just like even from the pulse rate
and earbuds. You know what did that take? You know,
seventeen years for Apple to get to their nails. Actually
other companies did it ten years ago, So I don't

(06:39):
know why they're just doing it now. But there are
a lot of new innovations. For example, my colleague Janandag
Governent is leading a group here to revolutionize the early
detection of breast cancer and make it really comfortable and
easy to monitor changes to avoid the kinds of nightmares

(07:00):
of detecting cancer changing very fast between screens, or people
not going to get a mammogram or get screen because
it's uncomfortable or it's expensive. So she has built conformable
technology that shapes to the breast and allows people to
get you know, clinically significant great data without the discomfort

(07:24):
of you know, being pancaked.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
Unbelievable and it is really interesting to see maybe how
technologies we talked about kind of the health gap when
it comes to men versus women, you know, whether or
not technology can really help us. And wearables fascinating stuff.
I hope you'll come back and continue to kind of
fill our minds with what's going on, especially when it
comes to technology and wearable specifically Rosalind Picard. She's Director

(07:48):
of Science, Doctor of Science, I should say, Grover M. Hermann,
Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the MIT Media Lab,
Director of Affective Computing Research, joining us from Cambridge