Vanessa Siverls is the developer of BUP Smart Pad, a smart sanitary pad which will detect, monitor and indicate menstrual information. She’s one of those designers who creates from experience.
In April of 2015, doctors removed 22 fibroids from Siverls’ uterus which caused unpredictable and unmanageable periods for 10 years of her life.
“It affected my work, my job and ultimately my marriage. It was during recovery I started to draw apparel sketches with tech functions that I thought would help other women manage their periods more effectively. I believe the use of technology gives us the opportunity to actively listen and learn from each other so we can solve problems more effectively,” says Siverls.
The New Republic writer Emily Atkin writes in an article “Why Do Americans Refuse to Ditch Tampons?” that “though a monthly normalcy for around two billion people worldwide, menstruation rarely appears in American popular culture. When it does, it’s often treated as a source of embarrassment and shame, whether for comedic or dramatic purposes; sometimes it’s even a source of evil.”
Today at Make It In Brooklyn’s Female Founders Pitch Contest Siverls will pitch The BUP Smart Menstrual Pad created not only to help women manage heavy flow better, but combined with IoT, will inform them of issues related to their overall uterine health so they can take their lives back.
The First BUP pad Siverls created detected chemicals (iron and hormonal levels) and new ways to manage menstrual flows but had too many wires and wasn’t very user friendly. She says getting to the next phase has involved utilizing friends and other resources for data but also hacking her own design.
“I pretty much hacked myself. I go to Hardware Hacker on Wednesdays at Thoughtworks and was learning some Arduino which came in handy when my engineer used it to build our test model for saturation. I went to an amazing workshop on the Cannabis industry at Electrospective hosted by D.K. Smith, the resident Entrepreneur, and it was then I realized I should be exploring opportunities where there is funding and support for processing and manufacturing that will get me to my goals quicker.”
