A team comprised of a UC Davis MBA and a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering won big during the GSM’s 2016 Big Bang! Competition.
Their wearable birth control device, PlayPatch, received the first prize of $20,000 and the people’s choice award of $2,500.
Chuck Temple (MBA, ’16) and his partner Justin Klein touted the device as ‘natural contraception 2.0’. The user wears the device under her arm, where it measures basal body temperature. PlayPatch then sends a wireless message to the woman’s smartphone with the information, which determines the days on which she is ovulating.
“I really started to realize the problem that women experience with contraception when I was with a long-term girlfriend who went through many hormonal methods trying to find something that didn’t give her really bad side-effects. It was long and rough process; I was sympathetic to her, but as a guy, I didn’t really get it,” noted Klein, who is also a business development fellow at UC Davis GSM.
Part of the product’s development was a survey of nearly 250 women from various demographics. The results proved that there was great interest in a side-effect free contraception method. A number of women tested the prototype of PlayPatch, and reported that it was “surprisingly comfortable”.
Klein and Temple met through UC Davis’ GSM’s business development network, which presents business and science/engineering candidates with knowledge sharing opportunities.
Temple and Klein have said that PlayPatch is as effective as the birth control pill, and that it’s the solution of the future for the reported 6 million women in the U.S. who are dissatisfied with their current method of contraception.