An outline of the product concept

The concept is a consumer product intended to temporarily make the ubiquitous TV monitor into a non-entertainment utility, in association with the BioMeter. We want to provide a means for the display of the raw measurement data that is normally hidden, to those women who will have purchased our BioMeter. Some of the first buyers, because of their familiarity with the BBT temperature charting, may want to see the graph of the BioMeter measurement results. That way, they will be able to use the data for birth control even before the device is offered for that purpose.

However, the true innovation comes when the Interface Unit provides a means for adding information to the menstrual cyclic data. Such patient information is currently entered into one or more questionnaires on paper, and the sheets eventually end up in the physician's office being transcribed into computer data.

The reason for this product concept is that the TV is everywhere whereas the home PC is not - which is even more the case outside of the US. The BioMeter has a global applicability and appeal for natural family planning users.

HERE IS THE MAIN POINT:

The primary North American use of this fecundographic utility will be by the many women who suffer with depression or with premenstrual syndrome, and whose doctors need to diagnose whether the case is PMS or clinical depression. The differential diagnosis is where the questionnaires come in, and our primary diagnostic device determines ovulation, the essential criterion for the diagnostic differentiation.

The questionnaires are called "instruments" by the psychiatrists. There is a major disconnect between them and the primary care physicians. This creates an opportunity to fix things for the benefit of the consumers. Perhaps not surprisingly, this "psychiatric instrument" methodology is under-utilized by the clinicians, being used essentially as a well-established clinical research tool. To their detriment, the patients in doctors' offices are not given the benefit of this tool.

Other reasons for pushing this TV Interface Unit concept are:

1) the product is immediately meaningful to the millions of users of natural family planning throughout the world,

2) the technology, once developed, has other uses,

3) the BioSense project can benefit from this development in two ways: first as a means of enhanced data gathering in large-scale clinical trials, and then as an additional source of revenue from the derivative product, and

4) this gives the BioSense venture a broader scope.

The reader should associate this concept with the Interface Unit invoked in the BioSense executive summary as an example of a derivative product.

Please look at the picture of the BioMeter, below. The device is small, unthreatening, and will be made even more feminine than the prototype represented here. Nothing off-puttingly clinical about it, for it is a woman's daily companion tool, much like a lipstick or indeed like a tampon applicator. In the same vein, the Interface Unit is NOT another unfriendly VCR remote control but the anti-thesis of that!

The controls of the Interface Unit cannot be seen in the picture because they are out of sight. Visualize the Unit as built into the storage case seen on the left of the BioMeter device, with the controls on the lid, the little case closed and its top made to reveal the few control buttons or keys required to navigate through the questions and answers...

The questionnaire of the so-called psychiatric instrument that is associated with the given menstrual profile involves multiple choice questions, which appear on the TV monitor, and the answers involve just clicking with a cursor placed into selected buttons on the screen - no typing. The prototype will take advantage of existing technologies such as the fact that the TV already has an infra-red input/output port, provided for the standard remote control.

Since in this illustration the storage case of the BioMeter is open, the controls on the outer surface of the lid are out of sight.

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