KTH InspireLab · Home-based hormone diagnostics
Women's health doesn't need more empathy. It needs more engineering.
We are building an affordable optical system that measures six hormones in urine, at home, every day. Urine instead of blood. Daily instead of a few times a year.
The problem
Hormones change every day. We measure them a few times a year.
Hormones shape metabolism, fertility, mood, sleep and cognition. Yet quantitative measurements still come from occasional blood tests in a clinic: a single snapshot of a system that never stands still.
What happens between the measurements?
Today: clinic blood tests2 of 28 days
day 1day 14day 28
Our aim: home urine sampling28 of 28 days
day 1day 14day 28
4–12 yrs
Typical delay before endometriosis is diagnosed.
WHO 2023 · Becker et al., Lancet 20241 in 6
People affected by infertility. Ovulation disorders cause about 40% of female cases.
WHO 20233–8%
Women living with PMDD, a severe, hormone-linked mood disorder.
Critchley et al., Nat. Med. 2025The project
A hormone lab on a kitchen counter.
A non-invasive, reusable, home-based platform that turns an ordinary smartphone into a quantitative, multi-hormone analyser, at a price that does not exclude anyone.
Sample
Urine, at home, in a reusable container. No needles, no consumable lock-in.
Illuminate
A miniature light source and the phone's own flash light up the sample.
Detect
A KTH-made spectrometer together with the smartphone camera reads the spectrum: pixels become data.
Analyse
AI compares each reading with the user's own baseline.
LHFSHEstrogenProgesteroneCortisolSerotonin
For each woman
Her own hormone map
Real concentrations, tracked daily, next to mood, sleep and pain. Earlier signals for PCOS, endometriosis, primary ovarian insufficiency and the transition into menopause.
For research
Data that doesn't exist yet
Opt-in, anonymised uploads can build the first large longitudinal dataset of how hormones interact with health and well-being.
For equality
Affordable, everywhere
Designed to be low-cost and easy to use, including in settings with limited access to specialist care.
Research
Three questions, asked together.
What do we need to measure?
The optical fingerprints of key hormones and their metabolites in urine, and the conditions that make them clearest.
Protein science · hormone biology · bioanalytics
How can we measure it?
A compact, high-resolution spectrometer built from fibre gratings and a phone camera, with a sample container designed for it.
Photonics · fibre optics · spectroscopy · materials
What can the data tell us?
Signal correction, validation against laboratory assays, and patterns that sparse measurements cannot show.
Signal analysis · AI · longitudinal data
2026–2030 · four years
Funded by KTH InspireLab
Applied Physics & Protein Science, KTH
AlbaNova & SciLifeLab
Clinical input from Karolinska Institutet
How we work
Different disciplines, one problem.
No single discipline can solve this alone. Photonics, hormone biology and data science meet in every decision we make.
Inclusion and shared leadership are our starting point, not our goal
We don't treat inclusion and joint leadership as targets to reach later. They are where the project begins: not a policy added on top of the science, but how a project about gender equality has to be run.
If women's health needs more engineering, engineering needs more than one name at the top.
What that means in practice
- Three PIs, one projectScientific decisions are taken jointly, every week.
- Shared supervisionStudents are co-supervised across disciplines.
- Transparent creditAuthorship and attribution are distributed openly.
- Room for every voice"I don't know, can you explain?" is a normal part of how we work.
- Deliberate distribution of opportunitiesTalks, visibility and responsibility are shared on purpose.
- Women's data, governed by womenData sharing is opt-in, anonymised and secure.
People
Three PIs. Shared scientific leadership.
Michael Fokine
Professor, Department of Applied Physics, KTH KTH profile →Cecilia Williams
Professor, Department of Protein Science, KTH · SciLifeLab KTH profile →
PhD studentsMaster's and bachelor studentsData scienceClinical advisers
Join us
There are many questions we don't know how to answer yet. Come help us answer them.
Physicist, biologist, engineer or data scientist: you belong here.
Open
PhD position
Hormone sensing between biophysics and biotechnology, supervised by all three PIs.
Read the ad →
Rolling
Master's theses, bachelor projects and project courses
For students in nanotechnology, applied physics, biomedicine, biotechnology or related areas. Experimental or AI-based, at AlbaNova or SciLifeLab.
See student projects →
Open to enquiries
Postdocs and researchers
Bring your own fellowship idea and let's develop it together.
Open to enquiries
Collaborate with us
Clinicians, researchers, app developers and partners who share the goal.
Support the project
Help us answer questions conventional research cannot yet answer.
Closing the women's health gap could add an estimated USD 1 trillion a year to the global economy by 2040 (McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum, 2024). The science behind it still has to be built.
People
More students and researchers across disciplines.
Measurements
Technology that doesn't exist yet.
Data
The first long-term, multi-hormone datasets.
Ideas
Experiments too bold for ordinary grants.
Talk to us:
- Carlota Canalias
ccg@kth.se - Cecilia Williams
cwil@kth.se - Michael Fokine
fokine@kth.se