Bloom: Technology for a Healthier Pregnancy
This year at the Belgian Trade office we have enjoyed following the rise of Bloom Technologies. This San Francisco based Belgian startup has been working tirelessly to help women have healthier pregnancies with better technology.
Eric Dy and Julien Penders founded Bloom Technologies in 2014, as a spin-off of Belgian nanoelectronics research center IMEC, with the simple premise of using technology to improve the health of women and babies worldwide.
Pregnancy and the first 1000 days of life are the biggest determinant of long term health. Eric and Julien were driven to use their expertise in connected devices and data analytics to empower women to make healthy choices during and after pregnancy, while providing healthcare providers better information to more efficiently identify complications and intervene before it’s too late.
Bloom’s mission is to empower women with personalized insights to guide healthy choices in their pregnancies. Technology to monitor pregnancies has been stagnant for 40 years. Bloom changes that.
Bloom’s first product is an affordable, lightweight, medical grade wearable sensor for expecting moms, capable of tracking important pregnancy signals of maternal and fetal health and creating new ways of bonding with your baby. Mothers can also track exercise, stress, diet, weight and receive feedback to help them adhere to clinically recommended guidelines.
Bloom helps automate counting kicks which provides reassurance to many expectant moms, and allows the information to be shared with her family and partner. So when the baby is being particularly active, her partner’s cell phone or smart watch can vibrate!
In their last trimester, women are asked to count contractions, which for many women, especially first time moms, is not so straightforward. Bloom helps by measuring the frequency, duration, and intensity of contractions. During labor and delivery this removes the stress of timing contractions by automatically and objectively measuring for her, reducing the pressure on her and her partner.
Bloom is launching later this year and can be pre-ordered online at www.bloom.life
Originally published at www.belgiantrade.org on August 28, 2015.
