WoW Woman in WearableTech | Kristen Warren, Biomedical Research Engineer at EMBR labs

Interview by Stephanie Zopf, Women of Wearables Boston Chapter Ambassador

Kristen Warren is a Biomedical Research Engineer at EMBR labs. Kristen has a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She has worked as a Biomedical Research Engineer for Embr Labs for three and a half years. Embr Labs is located in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kristen, you are the first female engineer at Embr Labs - How did you get into this industry? Tell us a bit more about your background.

I’ve always wanted to be in the biomedical field because the human body as a complex system is intellectually fascinating. I actually started as a biochem major in college! I quickly realized I was not the best at chemistry but pretty good at math, and that I really enjoyed the creative aspect of engineering—getting to build something that no one else has before is really exciting.

After switching to an engineering major, my focus turned to using the multiple facets of engineering to create something that helps interact with or assist with something physiologically. For my senior engineering project, I reconfigured both the software and hardware of a non-invasive glucose monitor for Medtronic, to improve the device's accuracy. During and after undergrad, I performed research at Keck Graduate Institute, interpreting the muscle signals around the eye to detect when a person was falling asleep at the wheel. I closed out my graduate studies with a Master's thesis where I validated a hardware change and created an accompanying algorithm to reduce the effects of motion artifacts during heart rate measurements from a wearable pulse oximeter.

That’s really how I got into the wearable device space. The technology being used in hospitals to measure heart rate and blood oxygen level from your fingertip is the same technology being used in a majority of wearables to measure heart rate. And the demand for user access to biometrics is growing every day. Making something for a consumer is a whole different playing field than designing a medical device.

Embr found me through an internship program (MassLSC), freshly graduated but not committed to a full-time job yet. The idea of a device using electrical, mechanical, and thermal elements, all working together to interact with your thermo receptors to make you feel better, sounded like a fun challenge, and the company seemed like a great place to work—and here I am three years later!

What does your current job role entail?

Being the first employee has meant that my “current job role” has changed multiple times since I started. When I first started it was everything from debugging prototype boards, to coding demos in Python, to reading papers about thermoreceptor firing rates and designing experiments to prove that our hypotheses were true. These days, we’re moving into a space we’re calling Thermal Wellness. One of the most exciting things about Embr is the potential for temperature to solve a wide range of problems for users. Many things we take for granted have what we call ‘thermal undertones.’ For example, expressions such as ‘getting cold-feet’, being ‘hot-headed’, or being ‘frozen in fear’ come from actual physiological phenomena. My current job role is reading papers about how temperature plays a part in things like mood and sleep, and creating the thermal interventions that we call waveforms, taking them from an initial hypothesis all the way through consumer validation. 

Wave bracelet by EMBR labs. The Wave is the first bracelet that uses science to give you control over the way you experience temperature, so you can feel more comfortable anywhere.

What projects are you working on at the moment?

A lot of exciting work really bringing forward the science of Thermal Wellness, focusing on our known use cases that expand beyond Thermal Comfort. I'd love to share more but most of these projects are confidential at this time.

How has your career progressed since your degree? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?

One of the most exciting things about startup life (but also the most anxiety-inducing, to be honest) is the challenge of learning things you’ve never done before, with no one to teach you how to do them. I know a ton more about business and marketing and product design than I would have ever learned in school. 

Being a small startup has also given us the opportunity to be much more user-focused than would be possible at a large organization. Yes, I’m designing thermal interventions where I need to get the code and the timing right from a science and engineering perspective; but I’m also designing user experiences. Wearable devices are intrinsically personal because they are worn on the body and you interact with them directly. Especially in our case where we’re not necessarily tracking anything but giving thermal sensations to someone, it really matters how each person experiences those sensations. I’ve gotten to learn about human subject testing as well as how to receive and design around subjective feedback to create a technology that satisfies the customer’s needs.

I stumbled into this industry and this position, but it certainly satisfied my desire to augment the human experience while being intellectually challenged. 

What are your biggest achievements to date?

Generally? I’m extremely proud of both my degrees, Harvey Mudd is no easy college to graduate from. And, getting through a Master’s thesis all by myself, giving the presentation, and writing a paper on it was pretty amazing. 

In terms of Embr achievements, I remember the day I got the dataset that proved our hypothesis on which thermal waveform variable to change to make someone feel a Slightly Cool, vs Cool vs Cold sensation more effectively and precisely! Shipping our first set of units via Kickstarter after months of development and validation was also pretty surreal—people are actually going to wear the thing we created and feel the things we want them to feel!?

Even after the first shipment, all of the thermal waveform development I’ve done since has been very fulfilling. I’ve designed an Extended Duration Mode (that I affectionately call EDM 🎵) that allows our device to auto regulate both the intensity and timing of the cooling waves based on the temperature of the heatsink (the metal part of the device that holds heat during cooling), and a Fall Asleep Mode that generates slower, gentler thermal sensations to help users decrease fall asleep faster (validated with Johnson & Johnson!). Knowing people are out there loving the device and getting real value out of the work that I’ve put into the product is a really great feeling. Additionally, some of these thermal waveform design principles have been turned into patent applications!

I also co-authored a paper we did with University of California, Berkeley, validating that our wearable does significantly change users’ overall reported whole body thermal sensation and thermal comfort. Receiving that kind of scientific validation was gratifying from a data analysis standpoint, but also reassured us that the thermal interventions we'd spent years developing actually work.

What does the #WomenInTech movement mean to you? What are the challenges of being a woman in wearable tech / STEM?

I think the #WomenInTech movement is important for both solidarity and visibility. Unfortunately, it’s still relatively common to be in an engineering meeting and realize you’re the only woman in the room. Despite people’s best efforts, they will still look at you differently and treat you differently. Even if I had been the one to implement something, after hiring male engineers, people would sometimes go to them to ask questions, assuming that they were the experts or more knowledgeable. 

In terms of solidarity, just knowing that I have a community to fall back on, to vent to, and to ask for advice on how to deal with these things has been a comfort. I’ve been an active participant in the Society of Women Engineers since I was in undergrad as well. 

In terms of visibility, seeing that there ARE kickass women in tech makes you feel less alone. When I started college, I thought I had to dampen my femininity to fit in. I started wearing men’s basketball shorts and t-shirts because I thought the women who were in tech were “more laidback” and needed to be “one of the guys.” Seeing this movement and community has been extremely helpful against this flawed train of thought. 

One of my favorite quotes is “Powerful women do not have to act masculine or cold in order to get things done. Powerful women can be huggers who name their dog Lamby and make flower crowns in their free time.” (said by Taylor Alison Swift, of course.) I think it’s important to internalize that I can love makeup and pretty things and Taylor Swift and be just as technically capable as the men. It’ll just take some convincing for the rest of the world to believe that too.

In your opinion, what will be the key trends in the wearable tech and digital health industry in the next 5 years and where do you see it heading?

I’m extremely excited about the push towards Fem Tech, and the women in tech movement goes hand-in-hand with that—caring about women's health and well-being in a world where it’s so often ignored or minimized is great, and if we’re making products for women, we need women to be working on their development! 

Additionally, the Digital Therapeutics field is growing pretty rapidly, and we believe we are uniquely positioned to fit into this space. Thermal Interventions and cues can be very helpful in symptom management for a number of conditions.

Who are your 3 inspirational women in wearable tech and digital health?

Definitely Rosalind Picard. Affectiva and Empatica are both companies that I admire and find exciting. 

Also, Fotini Markopoulou. Embr is remarkably similar to doppel in a number of ways. We both work in the realm of psychophysiology and design wearables that create oscillatory interventions to affect how people feel! I empathize with the journey of coming from a scientific background and convincing the world that pulses of something on the wrist is not “a scam.”

Another wearable company that I’ve really admired is the Bellabeat, ergo Urska Srsen. Not only are the products gorgeous, they're also doing an excellent job of understanding and providing tools specifically geared toward women's health.

Website: https://embrlabs.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Embrlabs

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/embrlabs

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/embrlabs/

Connect with Kristen on Linkedin.

This interview was conducted by Stephanie Zopf, Women of Wearables Boston Chapter Ambassador. Connect with Stephanie on Twitter or LinkedIn.