Category: Health Tech CoLab

Berkeley students Paige Lyles, Megan Chan, and Ariana Satari know what it’s like to start their periods unprepared: “the feelings of panic and stress that flood your chest as you have to drop what you’re doing and rush to find a solution,” says Lyles.

But despite periods being a natural bodily function, the lack of access to period products in public places (not to mention the lack of education around menstruation) leaves many people in this very position — even while toilet paper and tissues are provided in public restrooms without a second thought. “Period poverty” affects everyone, Lyles, Chan, and Satari point out: from unhoused people to “working students and parents who have to choose between buying food and buying increasingly expensive period products.”

That’s why Lyles, who studies civil and environmental engineering, and Chan and Satari,  mechanical engineering, founded Hebee, a smart period-products dispenser and mobile app for school campuses where both menstruators and facilities staff can see on the app where dispensers are located and exactly how many pads and tampons are stocked in each. One of its unique innovations is a universal wall that can expand or contract to fit products of varying size.

Hebee is one of two Berkeley student teams that developed their innovations over the past year through the Health Tech CoLab, an ecosystem to support students developing medical devices, diagnostic tools, and digital health tools that increase access to healthcare. The CoLab’s Health Access Cohort also included Diaita, which offers personalized diet and exercise plans as well as cognitive behavior therapy to ward off Type 2 diabetes and its associated illnesses. 

“These teams are not only examples of clever product innovation, but they epitomize what it means to be social innovators,” says CoLab manager Karenna Rehorn. “They’re motivated and guided first and foremost by wanting to improve people’s health and lives and to address glaring social and health disparities.”

Being a part of the Health Access Cohort, says Diaita cofounder Ariel Ho, a registered dietician from Taiwan and Biomedical Visiting Scholar at Berkeley, “has given the team the chance to participate in various workshops on customer discovery, prototyping, user testing, and pitch development.” The CoLab, she adds, “has provided Diaita with opportunities to connect with academic and industry experts to gain insights into how to build a product that better fits user needs and furthers healthcare access.”

Ho founded Diaita a year ago. Like the Hebee team, they noticed a glaring gap in a field of healthcare and access: the “need for a digital health intervention that provided prediabetic individuals with personalized, flexible, culturally responsive diet and activity suggestions with an emphasis on long-term, sustainable behavior change.”

As CoLab residents, Ho and collaborators Midori Pierce, a Master of Information Management Systems student, and Meng-Chia Chiang, in the Haas Global Diploma Program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, conducted more than 100 interviews to understand potential users’ needs in order to determine product-market fit, performed in-depth testing of their user interface and user experience designs, and prototyped their app. True to the CoLab’s mission of using collaboration and networking as engines of health-tech innovation, they linked up with medical professionals, insurance industry experts, investors, and researchers.

During their CoLab tenure, the Diaita team learned that they need not have a perfect “minimum viable product” from the get-go, but rather a solid one that can be refined over time. Originally, they had wanted to incorporate machine learning and a wearable device, but reconsidered those ideas as long-term goals. They also learned, as Ho said, to “communicate effectively through differences and use their diverse skill sets and perspectives” to work through clashing opinions on product design — something that naturally arises out of a team with such diverse professional backgrounds.

The Diaita team recalled “deeply personal and heartfelt” stories from their customer-discovery interviews about their experiences with diabetes-related problems — and interviewees’ enthusiasm for Diaita’s innovation.

“Hearing these stories has kept the team motivated week after week and month after month to continue on with this very important work, knowing that there are so many individuals who can benefit from Diaita’s health-tech solution,” Ho said.

Diaita plans to soon release an initial version of its product through Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store, while continuing to interview stakeholders, iterate their product, and network, with the hopes of raising capital, growing their customer base across new countries, “pursuing clinical validation through research,” and reviving that original concept of integrating a wearable device.

Hebee, founded in 2021, also used its CoLab membership to develop multiple iterations of its dispenser, including with help from the Jacobs Hall Makerspace and its 3-D printers, laser cutters, and other tools they could access at no extra cost. The team also gained valuable insight from the CoLab’s diversity, equity, and inclusion activities, going on to partner with community and student organizations in the Bay Area to obtain and give out period products to those in need. 

“We as a team have benefited from DEI workshops to ensure that our brand continues to uphold these values through the way we iterate our product and how our presence is cultivated within the community,” Lyles said.

Earlier in their residency, with help from Rehorn and their mentor Cathy Farmer, they figured out an effective user-testing plan, despite not yet having a fully functional prototype to try out on campus. Now, Lyles, Chan, and Satari are preparing to launch both their user-testing and their dispenser and app prototypes across the Cal campus — with app-development help from two “brilliant” interns, Andres Lam and Yugam Surana.

“The energy in the CoLab space is positive, and makes working enjoyable for us,” Lyles says. And that even includes a small kitchen where they can keep and prepare food on their longest working days. “It makes the student-founder balance a lot more manageable. Having a supportive community is especially important when you are in the early stages of development.”

How do research labs at the best public university in the world share insights and learn from each other? Through Lab Links!

UC Berkeley is home to hundreds of world-class research laboratories — each staffed by faculty and students driven by curiosity to produce new knowledge. These labs are dynamic organizations within the larger UC Berkeley campus, focused on conducting experiments, collecting data, and translating their work for the benefit of the world. To facilitate and advance the work of like-minded labs across campus, Lab Links is a new program to sponsor presentations and discussions among labs working on topics with similar characteristics.

Lab Links is hosted by the Health Tech CoLab, a collaboration-centered initiative housed at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Lab Links is part of Blum Center Faculty Director Dan Fletcher’s goal of bringing together faculty and researchers working on important problems who may not have crossed paths. This community-building event “connects faculty while providing educational opportunities for graduate students and networking in a unique format,” says Karenna Rehorn, manager of the CoLab. 

So what happens at each event? Graduate students from disciplines ranging from bioengineering to public health to molecular and cell biology share three slides summarizing their work to an audience of other UC Berkeley researchers they don’t know. Topics vary widely — from presentations on environmental diagnostics to tuberculosis to antibiotic-resistance bacteria — and each event pulls in unique attendees and speakers ranging from the School of Public Health to the School of Optometry to the Berkeley Water Center. Each presentation is followed by a Q&A, shifting the atmosphere to a group discussion where professors and graduate students gain insights and connections to add to their research. This lightning-presentation-to-informal-conversation sequence is repeated for each research lab in attendance, typically three labs per event. Following the presentations, there is time for networking and socializing.

Lab Links helps researchers working in different departments form collaborations between labs — all in furtherance of their own unique research goals.

Along with staying up-to-date on the work of other labs, this collaborative environment allows researchers to share tips, research practices, and contacts. “It’s an opportunity for networking, information exchange, and skill exchange,” says Rehorn.

At the first Lab Links, focused on environmental diagnostics, Amy Pickering, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Blum Center Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice, connected with one of Prof. Fletcher’s graduate students to help with a project in his lab. Fletcher’s lab needed samples of Soil-Transmitted Helminth (STH) eggs. STH refers to intestinal worms which are transmitted through human feces and are common in areas with poor sanitation and hygiene. Fletcher’s lab needed these real eggs from human samples to help optimize imaging and develop machine-learning algorithms to automatically recognize the eggs in images. The overall goal was to expand the number of diseases that the LoaScope, a cell phone–based microscope developed by Fletcher’s lab, can diagnose. This is one of many examples of the Lab Links vision in action — cross-lab communication increasing resource accessibility.

The topic of conversation for each Lab Links depends on many factors. For one, it has to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion, pulling in researchers across departments. But there is also a need-based element as well. Amy Lyden, a graduate student in Fletcher’s lab, helps organize Lab Links by developing the theme and then recruiting labs to talk about it. With tuberculosis being one of the top three infectious diseases in the world, and still insufficiently researched in therapeutics and diagnostics, Lyden felt that it was important to have the second Lab Links centered around TB.

The theme must also highlight the ongoing work and accomplishments of labs on campus. Sarah Stanley and Jeff Cox, both professors of pathogenesis, are principal investigators of labs focusing on tuberculosis. This made TB the perfect topic for addressing the needs of public health while featuring relevant Berkeley labs and providing them a platform. “Each Lab Links is about bringing people who are thinking about the needs with people who are thinking about technology and engineering,” says Lyden.

Future Lab Links? Rehorn has big goals for the event series, aiming to grow and diversify the audience to encourage even more amazing discussion. She hopes to incorporate academic grant opportunities in future Lab Links events ,where researchers can collaborate and combine projects, put together a proposal on mutual projects, and hopefully receive funding to further their research.

In order to improve networking, information exchange, and skill exchange, Rehorn emphasizes the importance of pulling together more interdisciplinary labs.

“Professor Fletcher articulated an ambitious vision — to bring together a variety of disciplines so that each researcher can learn from each other and gain new perspectives,” Rehorn explains. “And their collective work can bring about new knowledge in many different areas for the benefit of the world.”