Late last month, HeHealth, a San Francisco-based startup, unveiled Calmara.ai, a vibrant website adorned with emojis, positioned as “your tech-savvy BFF for STI checks.”
The premise is straightforward: a user worried about their partner’s sexual health can simply take a photo (with consent, as emphasized by the service) of the partner’s penis (the sole body part the software recognizes) and upload it to Calmara.
Within moments, the platform analyzes the image and provides one of two responses: “Clear! No visible signs of STIs spotted for now” or “Hold!!! We spotted something sus.”
Calmara touts the free service as a convenient alternative to a lab test for a quick check, leveraging artificial intelligence boasting an accuracy rate of up to 94.4% (though the fine print specifies a performance range of 65% to 96% across different conditions).
Since its launch, privacy and public health experts have raised concerns about several significant flaws in Calmara’s design, including weak consent verification, the risk of receiving inappropriate content like child pornography, and an excessive reliance on images to screen for conditions often unseen.
Despite being a basic tool for visually identifying signs of STIs in a specific body part, tests on Calmara revealed its inaccuracy, unreliability, and tendency to perpetuate stigmatizing information that its parent company aims to combat.
A reporter from the Los Angeles Times uploaded various penis images from reputable sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the STD Center NY, and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners to Calmara.
The platform flagged multiple images showing penile lesions and bumps associated with STIs such as syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, and human papillomavirus (HPV). However, it failed to recognize textbook images of STIs like a chancroid ulcer and severe cases of syphilis.
Moreover, Calmara frequently misidentified benign penile bumps as signs of infection, mistaking disease-free organs for concerning issues, and struggled to differentiate between human genitals and inanimate objects like a novelty penis-shaped vase or cake.
Dr. Ina Park, a medical consultant for the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, criticized the app for its high potential of false negatives and false positives, highlighting the risks associated with its unreliable outcomes.
Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease specialist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, acknowledged that Calmara cannot be endorsed as a screening test for STIs, emphasizing the necessity of blood and urine tests for accurate diagnosis.
While both HeHealth and Calmara utilize the same AI technology, co-founder and CEO Dr. Yudara Kularathne mentioned potential differences in issue identification between the two platforms.
Despite the disclosed accuracy range of 65% to 96%, experts like Dr. Sean Young and Dr. Joni Roberts expressed concerns about the platform’s effectiveness, emphasizing the potential harm of providing users with inaccurate information.
As HeHealth seeks additional funding and promotes its mission to enhance clarity around sexual health issues, critics question the efficacy and ethical implications of Calmara’s approach, suggesting that the app could inadvertently exacerbate stigma and misinformation related to STIs and digital health tools.
