Technology

According to a report by the American Cancer Society, an estimated266,120 women will be newly diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States this year and (according to a 2016 estimate) can expect to pay between $60,000 and $134,000 on average for treatment and care. But, after hundreds of thousands of dollars and non-quantifiable emotional stress for them and their families, the American Cancer Society still estimates 40,920 women will lose their battle to the disease this year.

Worldwide, roughly 1.7 million women will be diagnosed with the disease yearly, according to a 2012 estimate by The World Cancer Research Fund International.

While these numbers are stark, they do little to fully capture just how devastating a breast cancer diagnosis is for women and their loved ones. This is a feeling that Higia Technologies‘ co-founder and CEO Julián Ríos Cantú is unfortunately very familiar with.

&My mom is a two-time breast cancer survivor,&Cantú told TechCrunch. &The first time she was diagnosed I was eight years old.&

Cantú says that his mothersecond diagnosis was originally missed through standard screenings because her high breast density obscured the tumors from the X-ray. As a result, she lost both of her breasts, but has since fully recovered.

&At that moment I realized that if that was the case for a woman with private insurance and a prevention mindset, then for most women in developing countries, like Mexico where we&re from, the outcome could&ve not been a mastectomy but death,& saidCantú.

Following his motherexperience,Cantú resolved to develop a way to improve the value of womenlives and support them in identifying breast abnormalities and cancers early in order to ensure the highest likelihood of survival.

To do this, at the age of 18Cantú designed EVA — a bio-sensing bra insert that uses thermal sensing and artificial intelligence to identify abnormal temperatures in the breast that can correlate to tumor growth.Cantú says that EVA is not only an easy tool for self-screening but also fills in gaps in current screening technology.

Today, women have fairly limited options when it comes to breast cancer screening. They can opt for a breast ultrasound (which has lower specificity than other options), or a breast MRI (which has higher associated costs), but the standard option is a yearly or bi-yearly mammogram for women 45 and older. This method requires a visit to a doctor, manual manipulation of the breasts by a technologist and exposure to low-levels of radiation for an X-ray scan of the breast tissue.

While this method is relatively reliable, there are still crucial shortcomings, Higia Technologies& medical adviser Dr. Richard Kaszynski M.D., PhD told TechCrunch.

&We need to identify a real-world solution to diagnosing breast cancer earlier,& said Dr. Kaszynski. &Italways a trade-off when we&re talking about mammography because you have the radiation exposure, discomfort and anxiety in regards to exposing yourself to a third-party.&

Dr. Kaszynski continued to say that these yearly or bi-yearly mammograms also leave a gap in care in which interval cancers — cancers that begin to take hold between screenings — have time to grow unhindered.

Additionally, Dr. Kaszynski says mammograms are not highly sensitive when it comes to detecting tumors in dense breast tissue, like that ofCantúmom. Dense breast tissue, which is more common in younger women and is present in 40 percent of women globally and 80 percent of Asian women, can mask the presence of tumors in the breast from mammograms.

Through its use of non-invasive, thermal sensors EVA is able to collect thermal data from a variety of breast densities that can enable women of all ages to more easily (and more frequently) perform breast examinations.

Herehow it works:

To start, the user inserts the thermal sensing cups (which come in three standard sizes ranging from A-D) into a sports bra, open EVAassociated EVA Health App, follow the instructions and wait for 60 minutes while the cup collects thermal data. From there, EVA will send the data via Bluetooth to the app and an AI will analyze the results to provide the user with an evaluation. If EVA believes the user may have an abnormality that puts them at risk, the app will recommend follow-up steps for further screening with a healthcare professional.

While sacrificing your personal health data to the whims of an AI might seem like a scary (and dangerous, if the device were to be hacked) idea to some,Cantú says Higia Technologies has taken steps to protect its users& data, including advanced encryption of its server and a HIPAA-compliant privacy infrastructure.

So far, EVA has undergone clinical trials in Mexico, and through these trials has seen87.9 percent sensibility and 81.7 percent specificity from the device. In Mexico, the company has already sold 5,000 devices and plans to begin shipping the first several hundred by October of this year.

And the momentum for EVA is only increasing. In 2017, Cantú was awarded MexicoPresidential Medal for Science and Technology and so far this year Higia Technologies has won first place in the SXSWInternational Pitch Competition, been named one of &30 Most Promising Businesses of 2018& by Forbes Magazine Mexico and this summer received a $120,000 investment from Y Combinator.

Moving forward, the company is looking to enter the U.S. market and has plans to begin clinical trials with Stanford Medicine X in October 2018 that should run for about a year. Following these trials, Dr. Kaszynski says that Higia Technologies will continue the process of seeking FDA approval to sell the inserts first as a medical device, accessible at a doctoroffice, and then as a device that users can have at home.

The final pricing for the device is still being decided, butCantú says he wants the product to be as affordable and accessible as possible so it can be the first choice for women in developing countries where preventative cancer screening is desperately needed.

Over the last five days, Tesla shareholders watched the value of their stock decline by roughly 16 percent and saw nearly $8 billion in value erased, as the companycelebrity chief executive, Elon Musk, had what amounts to a very public breakdown.

However, Musk is not the only person responsible for the collapse of Tesla stock price. AsThe New York Timesarticle which precipitated the latest slide in Teslavalue on the public markets makes clear, the companyboard is also to blame.

For months, Musk has been showing signs of strain (generously speaking), and has been accused of making questionable decisions to drive growth and stifle criticism or dissent at the revolutionary electric vehicle company he founded.

During that time, as Shira Ovide notes in her piece from Bloomberg, Teslaboard (primarily composed of Muskfriends, relatives and initial investors) took no public steps to control or manage the situation.

Privately and on background the board (or certain members) expressed concern over Muskrecent behavior, drug use (both medicinal and recreational) and Twitter habits.

Those concerns should have been aired at the board level and the companydirectors should have exercised their ability to manage the mercurial Musk as his public actions became increasingly unmoored.

Something could have happened after the disastrous earnings call with analysts. It could have happened around the time of the strange active shooter allegations that were made against a Tesla whistleblower. It could have happened after Musk called a diver involved in the rescue of trapped and starving children a &pedo.&

At any of those moments the board could have stepped in and demanded that Musk face the consequences for actions that cost his company billions of dollars. They did not, and now Teslaposition is more precarious than ever.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Musk for his public statements around privatization plans for Tesla that may or may not have been real.

Itanother distraction for the companychief executive at a time when he is already under tremendous pressure to meet production targets for the companytroubled Model 3 rollout (even as it begins to hit its targets).

The problem is that Muskcult of personality is so intertwined with Teslacorporate identity, therea fear that as Musk goes so goes Tesla. Thatno way to run a business, and itno way to ensure long-term value for shareholders (either as a public or private company).

Ultimately the board at Tesla needs to step in and take a more active role in overseeing the company, before the next decision they find themselves confronted with is the companyliquidation.

Most mornings, after sifting through the nightmail haul and skimming the headlines, I make myself a cup of coffee. I use a simple pour-over cone and paper filters, and (in what is perhaps my most tedious Seattleite affectation), I grind the beans by hand. I like the manual aspect of it all. Which is why this robotic pour-over machine is to me so perverse… and so tempting.

Called the Automatica, this gadget, currently raising funds on Kickstarter but seemingly complete as far as development and testing, is basically a way to do pour-over coffee without holding the kettle yourself.

You fill the kettle and place your mug and cone on the stand in front of it. The water is brought to a boil and the kettle tips automatically. Then the whole mug-and-cone portion spins slowly, distributing the water around the grounds, stopping after 11 ounces has been distributed over the correct duration. You can use whatever cone and mug you want as long as they&re about the right size.

Of course, the whole point of pour-over coffee is that itsimple: you can do it at home, while on vacation, while hiking or indeed at a coffee shop with a bare minimum of apparatus. All you need is the coffee beans, the cone, a paper filter — although some cones omit even that — and of course a receptacle for the product. (Itnot the simplest — that&d be Turkish, but thatcoffee for werewolves.)

Why should anyone want to disturb this simplicity Well, the same reason we have the other 20 methods for making coffee: convenience. And in truth, pour-over is already automated in the form of drip machines. So the obvious next question is, why this dog and pony show of an open-air coffee bot

Aesthetics! Nothing wrong with that. What goes on in the obscure darkness of a drip machine No one knows. But this — this you can watch, audit, understand. Even if the machinery is complex, the result is simple: hot water swirls gently through the grounds. And although itfundamentally a bit absurd, it is a good-looking machine, with wood and brass accents and a tasteful kettle shape. (I do love a tasteful kettle.)

The creators say the machine is built to last &generations,& a promise which must of course be taken with a grain of salt. Anything with electronics has the potential to short out, to develop a bug, to be troubled by humidity or water leaks. The heating element may fail. The motor might stutter or a hinge catch.

But all that is true of most coffee machines, and unlike those, this one appears to be made with care and high-quality materials. The cracking and warping you can expect in thin molded plastic won&t happen to this thing, and if you take care of it, it should at least last several years.

And it better, for the minimum pledge price that gets you a machine: $450. Thatquite a chunk of change. But like audiophiles, coffee people are kind of suckers for a nice piece of equipment.

There is of course the standard crowdfunding caveat emptor; this isn&t a pre-order but a pledge to back this interesting hardware startup, and if itanything like the last five or six campaigns I&ve backed, it&ll arrive late after facing unforeseen difficulties with machining, molds, leaks and so on.