This founder’s own health challenge led her to devise a device to help others.

For more than a decade, Nicole Guadagno suffered from mystifying—and disruptive—digestive symptoms. The abdominal pain, fatigue, and simmering worry about what, exactly, was going on inside her body could feel like constant companions. Her symptoms interrupted her normal life, upending social plans, puncturing her high school and early college experiences with frequent trips to a specialist doctor in Manhattan.

When Guadagno got her diagnosis—ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disorder that affects the digestive tract—it helped to have a name. Now she knew that stress and her diet could work to mitigate, or exacerbate, her symptoms, which gave her and her care team a modicum of control. Over many years of trial and error, she finally found a treatment plan (including dietary changes and certain medications) that wrangled her unwieldy symptoms into submission.

“It’s really exciting, and definitely very grounding,” says Guadagno, a mechanical engineering student at Northeastern University. “I knew that as soon as I started feeling better, it was just night and day. I saw all of my energy come back to me and then I was able to do things that I haven’t been able to do in 10 years. You kind of forget everything that you used to be able to do until it comes back.”

But Guadagno, who celebrated a year in remission over the summer, says that she still experiences a near-constant vigilance for the slightest indication that she may be sliding back into the worst of her symptoms. Guadagno knew that if there were some way to gain better insight into her body, similar to the knowledge that some people with diabetes get from wearing continuous glucose monitoring devices, she’d have more peace of mind in remission—and would have had more precise control when she wasn’t.

Rather than wait around for innovation to emerge, Guadagno took matters into her own hands. She created Remetra, a wearable medical device that measures inflammatory markers through sweat and transmits the data to a mobile platform for tracking and analysis.

Remetra would continuously monitor the levels of a specific protein called the c-reactive protein in a person’s sweat. C-reactive protein is produced by the liver, and increases as a response to inflammation in the body. Indeed, it is so commonly associated with inflammation that its presence in the bloodstream is a strong indicator of an underlying health condition.

“Throughout my treatment, I knew if that was high, then it’s bad in there,” Guadagno says. “And if it’s not, then that’s really good.”

Guadagno was recognized among this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. For her part, Guadagno was honored among undergraduate student award winners.

“There’s very little out there that allows chronic care patients to monitor what’s going on with them in real time—most patients end up only getting care after they’ve had a severe event,” says Suzanne Tricoli, COO of Port One Companies, and a mentor of Guadagno’s. “Getting this kind of device into the hands of regular people suffering from chronic illnesses would be huge. It would mean that people don’t have to be dangerously ill to have their symptoms recognized,” she says. Tricoli, who has nearly two decades of experience in the healthcare industry, also has some personal experience with chronic conditions: her daughter, Jacqui Curry, also has an autoimmune disorder, and is a co-founder of Remetra.

“Because these diseases are not well recognized, there’s been a longstanding belief that they’re rare. But it’s becoming clearer that they’re not so rare; they’re just hard to spot. And for the patients, getting care can be next to impossible. Having the ability to self-monitor for inflammatory markers in real time is so important.”

So far, the most common way to test for c-reactive protein is through a blood sample, but in the last few years, researchers have demonstrated that it’s possible to measure it through sweat alone. The technology is still at the cutting edge of medical science, and Guadagno is still in the earliest stages of building up the wearable device—she’s finishing up her research into the existing literature, and moving toward developing a prototype to demonstrate proof of concept. Guadagno estimates she’s at least five years out from a market-ready medical device.

In the meantime, she’s working steadily on building Remetra’s associated app, which can be deployed much sooner with features that can start helping people with inflammatory autoimmune disorders today.

The app, as Guadagno envisions it, will enable users to input their daily diet and activities and track their symptoms as they wax and wane. Such a tool would be useful for mapping potential causes and effects, particularly between doctors’ appointments, which are often weeks or months apart. Guadagno remembers times when her symptoms were particularly bad—but would subside by the time she was in her doctor’s office. Without a dedicated method for tracking her symptoms and her lifestyle, it was almost impossible to recall what she had eaten or what her stress levels were like just before the onset of symptoms.

And even now, in remission, Guadagno will sometimes feel a twinge or a cramp that sets off alarm bells in her head. She’ll call up her doctor, describe what she’s feeling, and more often than not, be told that it’s not a symptom of ulcerative colitis. Maybe it’s a mild intolerance to a certain food, her doctor will tell her, but it’s nothing to worry about.

“Even just knowing that, and being able to say, ‘Oh, after I eat this thing I don’t feel great,’ would improve my quality of life so much,” she says. Being able to connect a mild lactose intolerance, for example, to an upset stomach a couple hours later means that she wouldn’t have to worry that it’s her disorder, flaring back up.

“I just would want people to feel like they are in control, or that they have a full awareness of what’s going on inside their body, because I think a huge piece of these hidden diseases is that you’re constantly playing this guessing game; you really have no idea what’s going on,” she says.