Podcast: Detecting Disease Using Menstrual Pads

In this episode, we explore MenstruAI, a pioneering technology that transforms a standard sanitary towel into a paper-based test strip to detect biomarkers in menstrual blood and discover how this electronic‑free system, paired with a smartphone app, offers users a simple way to monitor signs of inflammation or disease like cancer and endometriosis.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

Sanitary towels morph into test strips

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about quantum dots and how their fluorescent properties can be used for various applications!

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Transcript

So, this podcast is all about Daniel and I exploring things that we don't understand. And this one really hits out of the park because we truly, truly don't understand this product, but it's an impactful one. We're talking about how a sanitary pad could do more than just absorb. What if it could give us important insight about health? And this episode, we explore how researchers are transforming period products into powerful diagnostic tools, starting with a smart pad from ETH Zurich called MenstruAI.

What's up friends, this is The Next Byte Podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Farbod: Folks, welcome back to the Next Byte podcast. As you heard, today we're talking about something that's really out of the realm of our expertise, but it's something that we think is pretty important. So, we hope you feel the same and that's going to be sanitary pads. But before we jump into today's topic, let's talk about today's sponsor and that's going to be Mouser Electronics. You might be wondering, well, how does Mouser tie into this conversation at all? Mouser is one of the world's biggest electronic distributors. It doesn't really make sense that they would be involved in this conversation. Well, friend, do I have news for you? Mouser, the reason we love working with them is that they create all these incredible technical resources that are easy to digest about the groundbreaking tech that's happening in academia or industry. And one of the topics that they talked about recently was quantum dots. So, quantum dots, I would say is a passion of Daniel and I's from back when we were doing research in Kong lab at George Mason University, we were working on nanotechnology. As the name implies, quantum dots are just nanoscale particles, which have really interesting properties. One of those is fluorescence. And this Mouser article that we're going to be linking is talking all about the different opportunities and applications of quantum dots and their fluorescence, specifically regarding medical applications. So, that's where they tie in. They're actually investigating some of these topics that are super relevant to doing sensing at scale using novel materials. If you're interested in material science, if you're interested in the medical realm, or if you're just like us and love learning about anything and everything that's new, then make sure you check out the article that we linked in the show notes. I do what I can. With that said, let's actually segue into today's topic and we're actually going to be taking a trip all the way to ETH Zurich. I think we haven't hit them up in a minute, so excited to talk about them. Definitely one of our favorite universities.

Daniel: One of the best in the world.

Farbod: Absolutely. There's a reason we love them. And the product they're working on is called MenstruAI, which is just great naming. And as the name implies, they want to get data that they can then process with some sort of an artificial intelligence from the menstrual cycle, specifically using sanitary pads. Now, why is this such an important topic for them? And I love the little piece that is in the Wevolver article by the researchers. They're saying over 1.8 billion people, let's just round up to say 2 billion people, menstruate, but the menstrual blood has not really played a significant role in the medical world. Now, this is such a loss because there's apparently hundreds of proteins that are found in menstrual blood and there's a lot of correlation with the concentration of the proteins found in menstrual blood and what is found in venous blood. And if you're like me and you got to be in biology and you don't know what venous blood is, it's just in layman's terms, it's blood in your veins that's getting pumped through your heart, right? So, what's in menstrual blood actually has, gives us insight about what's going on in the blood that's pumping throughout our bodies. And this is significant because diseases like cancer or certain infections, as they start to progress in someone's body, they produce some of these proteins, which is then pumped through our system. And therefore, if there's a way for us to detect it in menstrual blood, we'll actually be able to understand what's going on inside of our body and get early disease detection. So, kind of putting all that together is that period blood contains good information. No one is leveraging it, but making good use of it could actually allow us to develop these incredibly low cost and consistent biosensors to detect diseases early on.

Daniel: And at a high level, right, we've seen this trend where we're taking more and more of our human body health data and feeding it into computers to try and understand what's going on. I wear several different types of health trackers to help me understand my workouts, my sleep, my recovery. There's all sorts of different devices that people are using in their bodies. There's subscriptions that people are signing up for where they send their blood work to a lab to get reviewed. And then the data gets reviewed by an AI. So, there's a lot of, there's a broad sweeping trend of saying, Hey, here's information from the body. Let's use state of the art intelligence and machine learning models to try and improve our understanding of the human body, improve our understanding of patient-to-patient health. But there's this huge opportunity in that, about a quarter of the people on the planet are menstruating and no one's using that blood, the biomarkers from that blood to indicate the health of the patient. And one of the three most important things that they found in menstrual blood are three separate biomarkers. One of them is called CRP, which is a general measure of overall inflammation in the body and stress in the body. And there's another one called CEA, which is a general cancer marker for within the body. And then there's also a very specific biomarker they're looking at called CA125, which can detect endometriosis and ovarian cancer.  So, that's specific to female reproductive health. There's another one for general cancer health and another one for general inflammation health. Those are highly present in menstrual blood, but no one's using the menstrual blood as a way of tracking that as probably one of the least invasive ways of tracking, right? Cause you don't need to draw blood from the body. It's already coming from the body. So, use it as an opportunity to capture that blood, run some tests on it and then see if you can use that as a way of indicating the patient's health.

Farbod: And that's, that's a good point to talk about. Well, like exactly how does this happen? Obviously, there's sanitary pads in the market. So, what did this team do to, you know, evolve that into a sensor and not just a sanitary product, as a standalone sanitary product. And their approach kind of reminds me of those COVID test swabs.

Daniel: That's what in my notes too, man.

Farbod: Yeah, okay, perfect. Great minds think alike, I guess. I'll compliment us that way, pat us on the back. But these folks designed a silicon channel in a sanitary pad that has these reactive antibodies for all the proteins, the biomarkers, Daniel, that you just talked about. So, this test strip will change in color based on the concentration of these biomarkers that are then found in the menstrual blood. Now what's cool is that I think, just like the COVID test, there should be a color change, but obviously we were giving it to labs to do the in-depth analysis. But very quickly, the user of the sanitary pad can use their own eyes to be like, yeah, this is like, for example, purple, which means that it's bad or there's a concentration of this or whatever. But in addition to the sanitary pad, this team has developed a companion mobile app, which you can use to scan the result. And they actually promote users to use that because it's got the, this is where the artificial intelligence comes in. It's got the computer vision and the sensing technology to pick up on those small differences in color intensity that might be missed by the human eye, which can give you very accurate and precise information about the biomarkers that were detected.

Daniel: I think the COVID rapid test actually is like one of the closest analogies to that. The way that works is you've got a strip of paper with antibodies designed on their antibodies on that strip of paper that are designed to change colors to different intensity levels when certain biomarkers are present in the sample. Same thing that's being done for the COVID rapid test is now being applied here to the sanitary towel with the test strip down the middle. There's no electronics in the pad itself, meaning that it's cheap, disposable, relatively easy to scale at without jacking up the cost. And then in early studies, they were doing this smartphone app as well with machine learning to get precise color readings on the changing color of the test strip. And really the way this process works is you wear the pad before you dispose of it, you scan it with the app and then the app analyzes that data and aggregates it to show your overall health information.

Farbod: And you quickly touched on this, but I want to highlight the cost aspect, right? So, I would imagine that right now, to do some of this blood panel work, it's not trivial, right? Like you probably have to go to a facility that has labs and the capability to, one, know, draw your blood and do it in a safe way and then put in the proper machines that can do the testing and then give you that feedback. All of which, you know, not only requires you to have the proper resources, but for you to be located in a region that has those facilities to support you. What these folks are going for is a very affordable and accessible way to get results again in a consistent cycle within like once every 30 days, you'll be able to monitor your own system doing nothing different than probably what you've already been doing. And I think that's really significant. And the inclusion of the analysis being done through an app, I think makes it even more accessible because at this point in the world, I think so many people have smartphones.  So, it's not too much of a reach to say that most users would be able to have access to this tool.  

Daniel: And it's not saying take a photo and send it to your doctor. It's saying scan it and you get instant feedback. So that's kind of where they're increasing access, let's say. You don't need the smartphone to be able to use the pad, but if you want an expert opinion, you can get that from the app as opposed to having to consult a medical professional every single time you're changing your pad.

Farbod: For sure. And now I think it's worth talking about where they're at, right? So, they’ve already done a small trial with volunteers. And the next step for them is to run like a proper trial with a hundred people. And the goal of this hundred-person test is to gauge the suitability of the product for quote unquote daily use, compare real life values versus the lab ones that they've accumulated so far, make sure that they're accurately representing the likelihood of you having a biomarker which indicates disease or not, you wouldn't want to scare someone, you know, and to optimize the user experience. And this is the interesting one for me. We've talked about the app. The user experience is maybe something that folks don't think about when they are considering sanitary pads, but given this application, it makes a lot of sense. It's now a medical device. And the STEM team is working with the Zürich University of the Arts, to make sure that they're getting the human touch involved in there as well. Especially, you know, as it comes for the UX design of the app and the product itself, et cetera, et cetera, which I thought was definitely worth noting. I love it when the worlds come together. But yeah, that's the state of this. So, I wouldn't expect it, you know, at Target anytime soon, but it looks like they're slowly taking those baby steps to bring this thing to life.

Daniel: And just pragmatically to speak about some of the different pros and cons I see here. Love that it's a non-invasive, easy way of checking in on your health with relatively low costs, no lab tests needed, no doctor consultation needed. Obviously early warnings for serious diseases are one of the best ways to help make them more treatable and improve quality of life for the patient who gets sick. So, the earlier you can tell about certain types of cancer, the earlier you can tell about these different biomarkers that are available in menstrual blood. That's awesome. They also said that it can help improve access to medical care and low resource areas. So, instead of having to do lab tests across lots and lots of people, lots and lots of people could be using these pads and then they can raise their hand when they realize that there's an issue. Some of the cons right now, it's not a true medical diagnosis. It's just a warning. And right now, it's kind of subjective. They use the app to help to make sure that you can get better understanding and to find changes in color. But one of the other potential challenges that they mentioned is that lots of blood consistency and volume changes daily and also from person to person. So, it's tricky to calibrate this and make sure that you get lab level accuracy. And they're still pending health authority approval. That's the last one. So, they're going to continue to do these testings, but you know, there's probably a while out, like you mentioned a couple more trials of testing and, uh, iterative improvement before you see it available everywhere.

Farbod: For sure. And again, this is a product that's really out of the realm of our understanding. But one thing I thought was interesting to note is another barrier I see for them is apparently 60% of the menstruating population prefers sanitary pads and the other 40% prefers tampons. I don't know how they would potentially translate this into the tampon market, but you're almost losing out on half of the market with this approach of being sanitary pad only. So, if I were to add an item on the wish list as someone that's not in that community. I think it'd be cool to try to merge the technology in there as well and give coverage to the other 40%.

Daniel: One last thing from my side as well. They mentioned, the researchers mentioned that it's like, it's more than just a technical project for them. It's trying to contribute to getting more equitable healthcare. Like they said, they were amazed even in 2025, the extent to which them mentioning that they were working on some sort of research administration was still really stigmatized, including in their academic circles, people telling them that their idea, I'm going to say are quote, nauseous or impractical. Like, come on everyone, this is literally half of the population. So, they were saying, you know, they have to be courageous here. They've got to break down a lot of the stigma around this to ensure that even if it's not their project, that women's health starts to kind of take more of a front and center approach when it comes to wearables and this cutting edge of using new technologies to detect diseases early.

Farbod: I mean that totally checks out. You and I have been doing this for over four years at this point and I would say this article is the first of its kind that we've come across. So, that's one of the reasons I think we're so excited to cover it and hopefully it won't be the last.

Daniel: Neither of us are women notably but we're trying to do our part.

Farbod: Trying. But I think that's maybe a good time to wrap things up. So, just a quick summary. Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed MenstruAI, a smart sanitary pad that doubles as a health test strip by detecting biomarkers like CRP, CEA, and CA125. Now these might not mean anything to you, but just a quick reminder, CRP allows you to understand inflammation in the body, if there is inflammation or not. CEA is a general cancer biomarker. So, is there any cancer development, any growth? And CA125 is specifically a biomarker for ovarian cancer and endometriosis. So, it's really great for the target audience that this product is going after. Generally, the pad uses color changing dots to indicate results, which are read via a smartphone app or through your eyes. If you're using the app, they have some AI running in the background, which basically analyzes the intensity of the color to give you a precise estimate of the concentration and likelihood that you have a disease. It's low cost, it's non-invasive, it's designed for comfort and privacy, and it's really accessible for regions that have limited healthcare access. So, while it's not a medical diagnostic tool that is on par with what you get at a facility, it's a powerful step toward giving more people control over tracking their reproductive and overall health. And even more importantly than that, making good use of data that most of the scientific community has been ignoring thus far.

Daniel: I love it.

Farbod: That's it. I do what I can. Folks, thank you so much for listening. That is the pod.

Daniel: See you.

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.