Finding a vibrator can often feel like a real-life tale of Goldilocks—you want equipment with the right intensity, a good battery life, and maybe a few different settings for different kinds of stimulation. A Berkeley, Calif. startup wants to simplify the process and has developed a programmable vibrator with sensors and an app.
SmartBod is the brainchild of a couple—one an engineer and the other an art student with a women’s studies background—now based at UC Berkeley. It’s a “smart,” internal/external stimulation vibrator that tracks arousal with a variety of embedded sensors then transmits data to a smartphone app. CEO Liz Klinger said she was inspired to create a more advanced vibrator while hosting passion parties, a kind of Tupperware party for sex toys.
“There were many women who would pull me aside and ask questions. The one that stuck with me the most was a bride-to-be that had never been able to orgasm through intercourse and hadn’t told her husband about that. She wanted advice and to know some products she could use,” Klinger said. “What we started seeing more, especially as we started working on SmartBod, is there’s a need to learn about our bodies more.”
The Arduino-based platform uses temperature, moisture, and pressure sensors to track arousal time, time to orgasm, and when sex would feel best based on a variety of factors. The vibrator has a small amount of on-board memory and connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth; it runs on rechargeable batteries with an approximately 45-minute battery life.
“Considering all the taboos and stigma around the topic [of sex], we don’t have vocabulary to talk about it. If you’re able to throw up a chart, that’s helpful,” CTO James Wang said. “Different people are more aroused or less around at different rates in different times. There’s not a simple linear function for almost anyone.”
A Multi-Billion Dollar Market
While there are several smart vibrators in the multi-billion dollar adult toy market, SmartBod’s biggest selling point its programmability based on the data gathered. Wang hopes users will be able to program their vibrator based on stats around menstrual cycle, stress, exercise, and diet. SmartBod is anonymously calibrating that data in beta testing, but hopes to partner with fitness apps or menstrual trackers to paint a more complete picture of the factors that affect arousal.
The SmartBod team, which includes engineers from Google X and Amazon, has been working with sex researchers to develop its product. They’ve constructed approximately 50 prototypes which have been 3D printed at UC Berkeley’s startup labs and accelerators, then tested on a rotating group of about 10 people. They’ve received a number of awards and won challenges, including California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences Biotech challenge, and took second place in the 2014 South by Southwest business idea challenge.
“The before and after in terms of response [from testers] has been pretty interesting. After, people usually have so many questions of what else they can try, what they can do. It opens up a whole new way to looking at your own sexuality,” Klinger said.
The team hopes to reinvent the way vibrators are marketed and sold as well, with the goal of destigmatizing sex toys. Most vibrators—even those at sex-positive, female-oriented shops—are subtly marketed to men, often showing the device held in a fist that assumes the vibrator will be used on a partner instead of yourself. The subtle marketing may be working, according to data journalist Jon Millward— analysis of a leading London sex toy supplier found that 1 in 5 men would purchase a male sex toy, compared to 1 in 20 women.