The Bitness Project
The Bitness Project is a creative DIY toolkit for women and girls to learn about their intimate health.
Profile
I am passionate about: women's health and social justice.
Show my name on the attendees list for events I am attending: Yes
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treza/
Researcher/Designer
Bitness
I'm originally from Portugal and after island hopping Manhattan, Singapore, and the UK, I will soon be calling Stockholm's archipelago my home. I'm a researcher/designer interested in human/woman-centered design interactions and prototypes as catalysts for discussion, mainly on topics of taboo. My long-term goal is to design technologies that can assist social justice pursuits and have the potential to vastly improve women’s experiences in health transactions, choices, and rights.
Research
0pt
Idea
14pt
Evaluation
0pt
Collaboration
0pt
Total
14pt
The Bitness Project is a creative DIY toolkit for women and girls to learn about their intimate health.
Dear OpenIDEO team,
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback and comments. This project aims to bring to life an existing academic study on the use of digital textiles to promote awareness and spark conversations around SRH. We are extremely excited to be working at refinement stage of this call.
Several key developments happened since the Idea Phase of the challenge:
1) In November, the team leader (Teresa Almeida) was invited to attend and present at the Women’s Summit in Cape Verde, Africa. While there, she not only gave talks about the Bitness project at the Women’s Summit and the University of Cape Verde, but also made valuable connections to local activists, journalists, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and health professionals involved in tacking different SRH problems. These encounters led to finding collaborators and partners and brainstorming about using the ten islands that form the Cape Verde archipelago as the initial test site for The Bitness Project toolkit. During the visit Teresa also discovered that the Portuguese speaking regions in Africa tend to be overlooked in terms of developing innovative educational solutions due to language barriers. Her native fluency in Portuguese will give her a necessary advantage when interacting with local communities on the ground and makes Cape Verde a natural first test site.
2) The team brainstormed around the idea of having a “3 point solution” for SRH education comprised out of the 3 interconnected elements a) Digital Textiles toolkit b) Directory for local Health professionals c) Digital solution to supplement the toolkit. The details are incorporated into the answers below.
Responses to your questions and concerns 1 through 5 (1/2):
Q1. The Bitness Project aims to introduce a comprehensive set of resources regarding SRH, including information regarding intimate anatomy, which has been identified as critical to girls and women’s reproductive health and sexual wellbeing. We are proposing a "3 point solution” for SRH education that will allow for both utilization of modern digital tools and hands on personalized learning and interactions using the Bitness textiles toolkit.
Part 1: How does my body work: A) Digital Textiles Toolkit Shortage of resources and access to health providers early on and throughout one’s lifetime can have a significant impact on girls and women’s perspectives of their sexual and reproductive health. The toolkit is a fun, interactive game-like hands-on experience. It will not only be a learning experience but will also help foster the conversation about the “hidden” parts of the body, what is often a taboo subject in many cultures. The initial pilot site for the project will be the Cape Verde archipelago, and will be done through a partnership will local health professionals, community centers and entrepreneurs. The following companies in Cape Verde already expressed interest in partnering with Bitness: networking platform Womeniseit, healthcare platform SelfCare, telecommunications service provider CVTelecom. As we continue our pilot on the archipelago we are planning to attract many others, especially in the education and healthcare sectors. B) At the same time, we will also begin initial prototyping of an Augmented Reality iOS app that we envision will supplement the digital textiles toolkit in delivering a more accurate visualization tool for educators. Since the app will be freely available at the App Store, it will facilitate the expansion of the Toolkit/App combo worldwide.
Part 2: Where can I get help: Creating a location-based online resource directory to accompany the kit—so people can contact health care professionals even after the workshop is completed. The online resource will be developed concurrently with the pilot, so the information will be naturally added for each pilot site as we move along. In turn, the health care and SRH educational services listed can use our Toolkit/App as a visual aid in their own practice. Developing those reciprocal relationships will be very useful once we move to Part 3 of our project.
Part 3: Textile tool as sensor: Basic self-monitoring. Following the successful implementation and adoption of Parts 1 and 2 of our project, we plan to transform the toolkit into both educational and diagnostic tool by including wearable sensors that will collect data, and thus possibly use it as a tool for remote patient monitoring.
Q2A. The Bitness Project aims to tackle SRH education in its diverse components. The project starts as a platform for pelvic health education but down the road it will expand into other areas. Pelvic awareness is a natural starting point since the foundation for this project is a comprehensive academic study in which Teresa spearheaded an investigation into pelvic fitness in young women. At the time, the goal was to understand how pelvic awareness could contribute to continence care and prevention (published research attached).
Teresa commented on The Bitness Project