The idea
kegg records a continuous, multi-frequency electrical reading of cervical fluid every day, at home. Today the product reads a single number out of it: the fertile window.
But that waveform is a rich, cycle-long measurement, and almost none of what it holds is being used. The question worth asking, and the one a federal research grant will pay to answer, is how much reproductive-pathology information that signal actually carries.
Why it's fundable, and why now
NSF's America's Seed Fund backs unproven technical risk, the could-fail-on-the-bench kind, not products and not clinical trials. That is the fit.
The mechanism by which cervical-fluid impedance shifts across the cycle is genuinely unknown; your own 2024 impedance paper says so plainly. That unknown is not a weakness in the application. It is the risk NSF pays to retire. Roughly $305K for Phase I, no equity, no dilution, and kegg keeps its IP.
The honest version
This is a smaller and harder idea than "the sensor detects PCOS." It's a measurement bet, not a product bet: build the first biophysical forward model of what the impedance signal is actually measuring, then derive the information ceiling. That is the hard limit on how much pathology signal the waveform can carry, no matter how good the algorithm, including an explicit branch where the answer is "it can't."
The people who built the sensor's physics are exactly the people who should build that model. And the mechanism being unsolved today is the very thing that makes the work fundable.
What it opens
A screening and monitoring story that goes beyond timing. No at-home device that senses cervical fluid has been used for pathology, and kegg's patents claim the fertile window only, so the ground is clean. The disclaimer you make today (mechanism unknown, not tested in PCOS) becomes the reason the grant exists.
How we'd run it
Whittaker AI would be the prime applicant: the software, the information-limit computation, the validation infrastructure, and the clinical-data network. kegg would be the research partner on the impedance physics.
There are a couple of things we'd size together, chiefly how the Phase I budget splits between the two, but none of it blocks a first conversation.
Who's behind it
Whittaker AI is a veteran-owned Pennsylvania clinical-software company. It's currently delivering production healthcare software under a state rural-health award, and it built and runs the data infrastructure behind a several-thousand-study reproductive-medicine research library. Clinical depth comes from a board-certified OB/GYN with reproductive-surgery training.
The exciting version here is the smaller, harder one: a measurement question, not a product claim.
If that's interesting, it's worth twenty minutes.