In order to test how well our my.Flow device is calculating the saturation of your tampon we needed to create an artificial vagina. With all the sex toys out in the world you would think finding an artificial vagina would be easy, right? Well the my.Flow team soon found out that it wasn’t so easy. The vagina is a beautifully complicated structure of a menstruator’s body. It has physical, conductive, and thermal properties that not many people often think about.

Our my.Flow team has been continuously designing an artificial vagina that will mimic the natural and biological properties of the human vagina.

We first started off with researching the dimensions, angle, and size of the vagina. The vagina in simple terms is a 30 degree angled tube that is approximately 9.5 cm in length and about 2.0 to 3.0 cm in diameter. By using the dimensions above, a mold of a vagina was created using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS).

Future steps in our vaginal test jig will be adding flow regulating tubes to mimic the flow of a period and placing the jig in a body temperature regulated environment. We originally wanted to emulate the multidirectional flow of menstrual fluid exiting the uterus through the vaginal canal by having two tubes in the jig (Version 1). After further consideration we decided a centrally located tube flowing from the top would more accurately approximate the menstrual flow (Version 2).

Version 1

Version 2