Many of us have experienced them in our doctor’s office: a speculum is cold, awkward, and sometimes anxiety-producing and painful. A team of designers is working to improve both the speculum and the entire pelvic exam process, however, and to do so in a way inclusive of women, transgender men, and nonbinary patients who need them.
The team of three women designers and a woman engineer who formed Yona Care all had personal experience at the receiving end of a speculum and wanted to create something better, reports Freethink. They began by researching the experiences of other women to get a better sense of the universal issues. They even had male designers read aloud first-hand accounts from women about their pelvic exams, to see if this would help them gain empathy with what the women had experienced.
At one point, however, the team realized that not everyone with a vagina identifies as a woman, and that they needed to broaden their stated goal of improving women’s health care. They spoke with people in the LGBTQ community, including transgender men and nonbinary people with vaginas, to learn about their experiences. This led to them to shift their language to talk about “health for people with vaginas” and to be more inclusive in their pronoun use. “By redesigning the pelvic exam ‘for women,’ they recognized that they were excluding the experiences of many people within the LGBTQ community. And some of these people had even worse experiences than the team had imagined,” Freethink relates.
Yona Care is working not only on redesign of the speculum itself, but also the whole experience of a pelvic exam, so they are more physically and emotionally comfortable for all who need them. While the project is still in the conceptual stage, it has the potential to be transformative. Those of us with vaginas (or whose partners/spouses have them) who received fertility treatments while creating our families know that a pelvic exam is often part of that process, and usually not the most enjoyable. Wouldn’t it be nice if this was better? More importantly, if a better experience meant that more people with vaginas go for regular pelvic exams that screen for cervical cancer and other diseases, these innovations could be lifesaving.
To learn more about the project and the past and future of the speculum, watch the Freethink video below, read the full article at their site, and explore the Yona Care site itself.