Together, Tariyal and Gire have been devising a radical new system of testing that will allow women to proactively keep track of their health by studying blood samples in the privacy of their homes. “I was thinking about how to get a large enough volume of blood to do this,” Tariyal says. “Until I realized that we actually bleed quite a bit every month.”

That’s when the lightbulb came on in Tariyal’s head: a tampon could double as a tool for collecting women’s blood. With the right technology, it could even test the blood for a range of biomarkers and send that information to a database that would allow a woman to track her reproductive health over time. It could be the most intimate wearable technology yet and a milestone in the development of the quantified self.

In 2013, Tariyal and Gire launched a startup called Next Gen Jane to begin work developing a ‘smart tampon’ and gathering information about the kinds of data women want to learn about their bodies. They’ve been traveling around the country, gathering groups of women to discuss medical conditions they have had or are worried about, to learn how to better cater to their target consumers.