The Innovative Restore Cup

Hi from the Restore Health team and welcome to our page! We are excited for you to join us on this journey to improve the lives of women living with the birthing injury obstetric fistula (OF). We are a group of NYU faculty and students working with global collaborators to provide an innovative solution, the Restore Cup, to as many as 2 million women and girls suffering with this stigmatizing injury, predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Obstetric fistula results from prolonged, obstructed labor when damage to the pelvic tissues creates a hole, or fistula, between the bladder and vagina, resulting in chronic urine leakage (urinary incontinence). Dribbling urine and malodor bring discomfort, skin irritation, social isolation, and stigma to girls and women suffering from OF. Affected individuals may have difficulty securing employment and find themselves ostracized within their communities. Women with OF typically wait 4-10 years before seeking treatment due to stigma and lack of access to services, and even then, only 2% of women are likely to receive surgical repair, the gold standard of care, in their lifetime. Even if surgery is accessed, successful repair is not necessarily guaranteed.  So what can be done for these women?

The Innovative Restore Cup is a low-cost, silicone reservoir cup that can be inserted vaginally and allows women to discretely manage their urinary incontinence due to fistula, thus reducing their vulnerability to stigma and allowing them to return to community participation and income-generating activities. Our pilot research with a prototype in Ghana in 2016-17 has shown that use of the Restore Cup can result in an average 61% reduction in urine leakage with some women experiencing a 99% reduction. Most women reported the cup easy to insert, remove, and clean, as well as comfortable to wear.  We are now leveraging these positive results to research this innovation within a larger clinical trial in Uganda starting in 2019—and this is where we need your help!

There are various research questions we need to answer:

1. Will design modifications that allow the user to store their leaking urine for longer improve the effect of the cup? 
2. Will we see the expected health, social, and economic impacts when women use the cup at home for an extended period of time? 
3. We explored acceptability among women in Ghana, but how acceptable is this novel device to women with fistula in Uganda? 

These are the questions we need your help to answer! 

We plan to allocate your donations to our research accordingly:

Join us in restoring health and dignity to women with obstetric fistula.

Please consider funding our research today!

-The Restore Health team (Joon, Joanna, and Nessa)

All donors will receive periodic updates on our research as it moves along.  We look forward to listing our Bronze ($100+). Silver ($200+), and Gold ($400+) donors on our website!