By Mike Montgomery
Cancer, unfortunately, touches almost everyone. Like far too many, I’ve lost friends to this horrific disease. Luckily, there are a number of exciting technologies on the horizon that might help save lives.
For instance, right now, women depend on monthly home exams and annual mammograms to detect breast cancer. Soon, though, they may have another option. Cyrcadia Health, a cancer therapy startup, has developed a sensor-filled patch that can be inserted comfortably under a bra for daily wear. Connecting through the woman’s smartphone or PC, the patch uses machine-learning algorithms to track the woman’s breast tissue temperatures and analyze this data at the Cyrcadia lab. If it detects a change in pattern, the technology will quickly alert the woman — and her health-care provider — to schedule a follow-up with her doctor.
“This technology is fully automated in the cloud,” says Rob Royea, CEO of Cyrcadia. The patch, whose predicate is FDA cleared, is expected to hit the market next year and had a greater than 80% historical trial success rate in detecting tumors, even in dense breasts (which are typically tough to read in a mammogram).
Cancer therapy startups that use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are proliferating. While some parts of the tech industry are coming under fire for creating products and services that only help the wealthy (most people don’t really need things like on-demand liquor delivery), this is one area where technology is being used to help everyone.
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