It can already stream the internet straight to your face, vibrate around your waist when you're slouching and track your health using only your wrist. Now, wearable technology is getting even more intimate and attempting to conquer the final frontier: the vagina.
Recently launched on Kickstarter, the KGoal Smart Kegel Trainer, produced by San Fransisco-based sexual health startup Minna Life, describes itself as a “Fitbit for your vagina,” an interactive device to guide, measure and track pelvic floor muscle exercise. It takes the form of a squeezable silicone pillow, connected to a smartphone app, that measures your “clench strength” and feeds the data back to a smartphone app via Bluetooth. It also has an internal motor for “real time vibrational biofeedback.”
“Pelvic floor muscles are one of the most important, yet least appreciated, parts of the body,” says the product's designer, Grace Lee, in the promotional video. “But many people never think about exercising them.” Running from the pubic bone to the base of the spine, the sling-shaped muscles hold the bladder and urethra in place, controlling urination. Critically important during and after pregnancy, they can often be damaged during childbirth, leading to incontinence and reduced pleasure during sex.
“30% of women need direct feedback to perform a pelvic floor muscle contraction correctly,” says the company's pelvic floor specialist Liz Miracle. “People come to me and say 'I didn't do my exercises because I couldn't see what was happening and I didn't know what was going on,' so they often just give up.”
By flashing its pink light, vibrating and charting your progress on the app – soon to come complete with games – the KGoal aims to change all that. “It's like having a gym, a physical therapist and a tracking system in the palm of your hand,” says Lee. Or inside your vagina, as the case may be.
The biggest challenge in developing the product was “fine-tuning the human interface and ergonomics of the device,” Minna Life's appropriately named Jon Thomas told Wired. “By that I mean the product shape and feel. Because KGoal must fit a wide variety of anatomies, it was a challenge to make the product both functional and comfortable across the full spectrum of our users.”
