Alisha Menon

Aurelia Vitals was founded with a broader vision: to build a Human Body Intelligence Platform capable of continuously interpreting physiology through next-generation wearable hardware and on-device machine learning. After completing NSF I-Corps customer discovery, we joined the Rice University Biotech Launchpad, where we developed the underlying sensing platform while working alongside clinicians, researchers, and commercialization mentors. During this time, we demonstrated one of the smallest comprehensive ICU-grade wearable monitoring systems in the neonatal intensive care unit at Texas Children's Hospital, validating the platform in one of the most demanding clinical environments. That experience established both the technical foundation and the conviction that entirely new wearable form factors could unlock physiological signals that existing devices simply cannot measure.

As we continued developing the platform, one opportunity stood out. Reproductive hormones orchestrate nearly every aspect of women's physiology, from fertility and metabolism to cardiovascular health and aging, yet they remain largely invisible outside of intermittent laboratory testing. Existing wearables infer menstrual cycle phase from historical patterns and retrospective temperature changes measured at peripheral sites like the wrist or fingers, while direct hormone measurements still rely on intermittent blood draws or burdensome daily urine testing. More broadly, this reduces hormonal physiology to coarse, retrospective phase labels rather than enabling continuous, personalized characterization of how reproductive hormone patterns evolve over time. We saw an opportunity to fundamentally change what is possible by developing a new wearable form factor positioned over the posterior ear, where physiology is more tightly coupled to the body's underlying thermoregulatory dynamics. In early 2025, we focused the platform on reproductive health and began developing Phira, a discreet earring-back wearable designed to non-invasively track estrogen, LH, and progesterone through thermoregulatory signals measured behind the ear.

Our first pilot study provided the first demonstration of continuous, non-invasive wearable tracking of reproductive hormones. We identified three novel thermoregulatory biomarkers that reflected estrogen, LH, and progesterone dynamics across the menstrual cycle, and developed machine learning algorithms capable of detecting key endocrine transitions, including the pre-ovulatory estrogen rise, fertile window onset, the LH surge, and ovulation. Building on these results, we are expanding clinical validation while advancing Phira toward commercialization. Our broader vision extends beyond fertility: to make continuous hormone insights a foundational layer of personalized health, helping women understand how their biology evolves across every stage of life, from first period through fertility, pregnancy, postpartum recovery and perimenopause, to menopause and long-term health.