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Non-invasive optical sensing

A new way to measure the vasculature.

Rivus builds speckle-based optical sensors that measure how blood moves through the body's vessels — from microvascular beds to peripheral arteries — surfacing structural vascular changes that a normal reading can hide.

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Method
Speckle contrast
Signal
Blood flow
Form factor
Wearable-ready
Speckle Map
The platform

Speckle contrast optical spectroscopy

When coherent light meets moving red blood cells, the scattered light forms a shifting interference pattern called a speckle pattern. The rate at which that pattern blurs encodes blood flow. SCOS turns that into a continuous, non-invasive read on blood flow and pulsation.

01 — Illuminate

Coherent light into tissue

Low-power light penetrates the skin and scatters off moving blood cells in the vessels beneath.

02 — Resolve

Speckle contrast capture

A sensor measures how the returning speckle pattern decorrelates — a direct optical proxy for flow.

03 — Classify

Microvascular phenotyping

Our models translate the perfusion signal into a phenotype: structural vascular characteristics not available with standard PPG.

Live speckle
Low flowHigh flow

Sweep your cursor or finger across the pattern. Fast motion decorrelates the speckle and its contrast collapses locally — the same effect real blood flow has on the speckle our sensor measures.

Why it matters
Blood pressure can appear normal even when your vessels aren't healthy.

Hypertension is difficult to detect in healthy populations due to masked hypertension and white-coat syndrome. For patients, treatment can pharmacologically normalize a reading while the underlying microvasculature stays structurally remodeled. Rivus is built to detect hypertension in a new way and answer the question "how much residual cardiovascular risk remains?"

Treated
The signal persists even in patients whose blood pressure is medically controlled — a feature of the science, not a limitation.
Continuous
Optical, non-invasive measurement designed to move from the lab toward everyday wearable form factors.
Where we're focused

One platform, many vascular questions

The microvasculature is an early window into systemic health. Our lead program is cardiovascular; the same sensing platform extends to adjacent indications under active research.

Lead program

Residual cardiovascular risk

Stratifying risk in treated hypertension by detecting microvascular remodeling that conventional blood-pressure monitoring leaves invisible.

Research stage

Sleep-disordered breathing

Exploring nocturnal perfusion signatures as a marker for sleep apnea and its vascular consequences.

Research stage

Continuous blood pressure

Tracking blood flow and pulsation to enable cuffless, continuous blood-pressure measurement.

Research stage

Maternal health

Studying vascular changes in pregnancy where early microvascular signals may carry clinical value.

The people

Built by optics and photonics biomedical engineers

Rivus brings together founders working at the frontier of biomedical optics, wearable sensing, and clinical translation.

Ariane Garrett

Ariane Garrett

Founder

Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, developing high-speed speckle contrast optical spectroscopy for cuffless blood-pressure monitoring. Goldwater Scholar and NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

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Darren Roblyer

Darren Roblyer, Ph.D.

Founder

Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University working on translational diffuse optical imaging, wearables, and remote patient monitoring. A two-time founder and Editor-in-Chief of SPIE Biophotonics Discovery.

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David Boas

David Boas, Ph.D.

Founder

Director of the Neurophotonics Center and Metcalf Chair at Boston University, and a pioneer of biomedical optics with 300+ papers and the 2016 Britton Chance Award in Biomedical Optics.

LinkedIn Neurophotonics
Publications

Peer-reviewed science

Our platform is grounded in published, peer-reviewed research in biomedical optics.

Partner with us

Working at the intersection of optics, hardware, and clinical science.

For partnership, investment, research collaboration, or press, get in touch.

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