The Future of Women's Health Begins at MIT

0:00As a top-performing advisor, you demand top-performing funds. That's why Fidelity's 1 ,000 experienced research professionals combine deep insights and advanced analytics to deliver consistent outcomes for clients across market cycles. Explore 300-plus Morningstar rated 4 - and 5-star funds at i.fidelity.com slash top funds. Across all fund share classes of Fidelity, Fidelity Advisor Shares, and Fidelity ETFs as of 6-15-2026, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need.

0:40Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off. Deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive.

1:23And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions, buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf.

1:57Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market.

2:35Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., Member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Let's get to the Businessweek Women's Health segment where we focus on key issues in developing technologies impacting the present and future of women's health around the world. We've got with us Rosalind Picard, Doctor of Science, Grover M.

3:16Herman, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the MIT Media Lab, also Director of Effective Computing Research. She joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Effective computing, what is it? Hi, it's such a pleasure to be here with you. Effective computing with an A is defined as computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion. Wait, okay. Wait, walk us through that. So it's in use today. And how is it, you know, what is it enabling us to do? Lots of things. It's an area started here at the MIT Media Lab decades ago. And initially, it was about giving computers the skills of emotional intelligence.

3:53Then we started learning that a lot of people could use better understanding about emotion also. Working with many people who had difficulty understanding others' emotions as well as their own, we started building wearable technologies that could monitor physiological changes in our body, even when we were leaving the lab, not just here hooked up to racks of equipment. Then those physical, electrical changes were documented, obviously for research, but in terms of helping others understand what a person is feeling or experiencing, how does that work? Yeah. So obviously emotions are very personal and very private.

4:29So we don't do any of that sharing of it without people's fully informed prior consent. However, there are a lot of times when people are confused about their own feelings. For example, a person's heart may be racing, and they may think that they have a cardiac condition, but in fact, it may be their fear of a cardiac condition that is causing the heart to race. So the wearables let you collect data in the real world. In fact, we built some of the first wearables here in the Media Lab, at least the first ones I know of, that could monitor the cardiac information and the autonomic nervous system information, like your fight-or-flight response.

5:05So walk us through, because this is, as you said, wearable computers at MIT. You've been working on this for over two decades. Walk us through a little bit of kind of where you guys or how you were thinking about it a couple of decades ago versus kind of where we are today and the progress you've made and how it's evolved in terms of what wearables can do when it comes to really assessing our health. In the beginning, we were interested in emotions that could help make people's experiences better, say, in a learning experience. Is the learner frustrated or bored or usability? Is this software driving users crazy or is it a great experience?

5:47And automobile driving, too. Is this situation on the streets stressing out people? Could we change the situation and have lower driver stress? So we started by building wired systems that could leave the lab. And then later we built versions with small wireless sensors that could go on jewelry and in wrists. We built the first wrist watch that could monitor simultaneously signals like electrodermal activity and PPG, the photoplasysography that's used to extract heart rate today. And also, you mentioned the Apple thing. We built some of the first earbuds that actually worked with an iPhone that measured heart rate with consumer quality data and published that, I believe it was back in 2009.

6:32Well, you know, I love what you are talking about. And I think about as a woman, as a mother of a daughter, that when it comes to women's health specifically, I feel like there is a lot that's not paid attention to. And obviously, there's been studies and research that really bear this out. So I'm curious about how technology or wearables can improve the health and health outcome and knowledge and assessment when it comes to women specifically. Thanks for asking about that. Women have definitely been left out of a lot of health studies. I learned that it's less than 10 years ago that the National Institute of Health started even requiring scientists to include female mice and rats in their studies before they were sticking with just the males to avoid the complexity of the female system.

7:20The opportunities are huge for health with wearables and especially for women's health. There are so many conditions that are different for women than for men, and they're not only vastly understudied, but the kind of data is very undersampled. It's like asking somebody what they feel or what they experience instead of actually counting the way that the pain each month is affecting their life or the way that the disruptions at night are affecting their sleep. And now we can do those kinds of measurements with wearables. So what is the right technology, in your view, that people, and specifically women, need to adopt in order to have this better understanding?

8:03Well, I'm not going to be promoting a particular product here today. At the Media Lab, our job is to make possible those future things. We're building the things that are pre-product that are, in some cases, decades ahead of what will be out there. Sometimes we're also using commercial systems to gather data. So one example of that is we use a smartwatch that collects autonomic data and movement data. And we're looking at the structure of what is enabling people to sleep better. Sleep is such a huge problem, and it affects women differently than men. And we need to help people fix it. So let me ask this question in a different way, which is when you look out at the products that are available with the context of what you've been working on for years at the MIT Media Lab, What has been harnessed and sort of what is still in the pipeline?

8:55What is still being researched? Like what percentage of the opportunity that you think is out there has actually been achieved with the products that are on the market right now? Where are we in that timeline? Oh, probably about 1 % of it has been achieved. There's so much more we can do. Yeah, there's a huge amount of stuff happening here that is not out there yet. As you saw, just like even from the pulse rate and earbuds, you know, what did that take? you know, 17 years for Apple to get to their announcement. Actually, other companies did it 10 years ago. So I don't know why they're just doing it now.

9:31But there are a lot of new innovations. For example, my colleague, Janand Agdevir, is leading a group here to revolutionize the early detection of breast cancer and make it really comfortable and easy to monitor changes to avoid the kinds of nightmares of detecting cancer changing very fast between screens or people not going to get a mammogram or get screened because it's uncomfortable or it's expensive. So she has built conformable technology that shapes to the breast and allows people to get clinically significant great data without the discomfort of being pancaked. Unbelievable. And it is really interesting to see maybe how technologies, we talked about kind of the health gap when it comes to men versus women, you know, whether or not technology can really help us and wearables.

10:28Fascinating stuff. I hope you'll come back and continue to kind of fill our minds with what's going on, especially when it comes to technology and wearables specifically. Rosalind Picard, she's director of science, doctor of science, I should say. Grover M. Herman, professor of health sciences and technology at the MIT Media Lab, Director of Affective Computing Research, joining us from Cambridge.

11:15all fund share classes of Fidelity, Fidelity Advisor shares, and Fidelity ETS as of 6-15-2026. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index.

11:51You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

12:32Quick one before you jump back in. You're listening for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more. Let's talk about healthcare for a second.

13:09It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day. They're a health care company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected, not complicated, for patients and providers. Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together.

13:46Technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients. And those prescriptions? Optum is working to bring costs down, save patients money, and make it easier to get refills. Little by little, Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Head to business.optum.com to see how. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline.

14:23At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts, or spending time on month-end close, it's time to get Brex AF, a Gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts.

14:59Learn more at brecks.com slash AF. Discover a spectacular island destination with crystal blue seas, endless sunshine, and the cool Bahamian breeze. Baja Mar, located in Nassau, Bahamas, offers your choice of three luxury hotels, over 45 fine dining and nightlife venues, Jean Batiste's all-new jazz club, the Caribbean's most luxurious casino, and one-of-a-kind experiences for the entire family, like our 15-acre tropical water park, wildlife sanctuary, world-class golf course, and so much more. Visit Bahamar.com today. Healthcare doesn't always work great. If you've ever waited on a refill or couldn't schedule an appointment, you get it.

15:39That's the kind of stuff Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else. So healthcare is connected, not complicated. What's that look like? cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get, and care that looks at the whole person how you need it. Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Learn more at business.optum.com.