There’s no doubt it’s hard to find time in a busy day to look after our health. Wouldn’t it great if technology could take over some of the task for us? Drum roll… enter femtech.
Female technology, or femtech for short, applies to a universe of solutions for women’s health tracking and improving, including conceiving, sexual education, diagnostics, cycles, pregnancy, and postpartum care. This universe comprises a range of solutions targeting reproductive health, sexual wellness and education, fertility, periods, pregnancy, and nursing care. As Frost & Sullivan reports, this market is expected to hit $50 billion by 2025.
We see many vendors, startups, and healthcare app developers in this realm, destigmatizing female body health and needs. In this article, we review three of the most interesting and empowering devices for assisting women in hacking periods, breastfeeding, pregnancy, and intimate training.
1. Ava fertility tracking bracelet
Female health is multifaceted due to unique experiences of periods, conceiving attempts, and pregnancies. Each woman’s journey through all of the events is distinctive, and their health impact differs as well. Tracking what happens now with the body is a great way to achieve mindfulness and provide the doctor with the valuable information any time the need appears.
What Ava does is offering a one-stop-shop wearable packed with sensors to track fertility, hormonal cycles, and pregnancy. The bracelet should be worn only during sleep, when it is collecting physiological data and sending it to the companion app, turning it into actionable insights to help women stay healthy, conceive faster, or get guidance through their pregnancy journey.
With its high-grade sensors, the bracelet can elicit approximately 5.3 fertile days for each cycle in real time to ensure that the user can achieve the best efficiency in their conceiving attempts. Going through the cycle, the woman can log her mood, sex, cervical fluid, period symptoms, and flow intensity within the app to enable detailed trend analysis.
When it comes to general health, the app can receive varied health data from the wearable and create patterns on such parameters as:
- Resting pulse rate
- Heart rate variability (physiological stress) levels
- Sleep quality
- Temperature
Last but certainly not the least, when the conceiving attempt proves successful, Ava’s user can move through their pregnancy with week-by-week explanations on body changes and guidance on how to keep their health under control during this unique journey.
2. Willow breast pump
It is completely up to the new mom to decide whether to go with a formula or breastfeeding depending on health or personal preferences. But when the decision is made in favor of breastfeeding, it’s not so easy to stick to it. With the existing stigma related to lactation, women can be harassed for public breastfeeding or denied the right to pump breast milk at work.
Even when pumping isn’t discriminated, it can still be really challenging for working moms to have 10- to 30-minute pumping sessions from twice up to 10 times a day, putting the tasks aside and sticking to their particular regimen no matter what. When staying at home, it can be a bit easier to schedule pumping more conveniently, but no woman wants to sit and do nothing but squeezing the pump all day long.
Willow promises to revolutionize the breast pumping routine, offering the new moms smart breast pumps with a completely hands-free experience.
These two pear-shaped pumps with disposable milk bags inside them are put directly into the bra—no cords, tubes, or bottles attached to them. They are quiet, dishwasher-safe and go with a companion app. Available for iOS and Android, the app aims to help new moms create and manage pumping schedules with such features as:
- Real-time pumping progress with milk volumes, current phase, and suction levels
- History of previous sessions and patterns in milk production
- How-to videos on using Willow
Willow destigmatizes breastfeeding, helping the women to seamlessly introduce pumping in their lives. New moms can keep advancing in their careers, travel, spend time with their family, and do anything they feel like doing without the need to stop and drop everything for at least 10-20 minutes.
3. Elvie Kegel trainer
Developing pelvic floor muscles is always a good idea, whether to recover from childbirth, prevent bladder and bowel issues, or improve sexual life. However, we tend not to really care about the “invisible” muscles until they call out to us in the form of unwanted leaks or reduced pleasure from sex. But even when the need or desire to get more toned is there, practicing itself can be challenging and outdated. Finding the exercises, maybe stocking on some equipment, and then trying to excel while not really understanding if the technique is right and efficient.
Elvie wants to give us the reason to develop the good habit and go all in for intimate health preventive measures by removing the guesswork out of pelvic floor training. Their connected Kegel trainer is a small, tampon-like device in a pastel mint color and discrete case, which allows women to charge it right from the side without anyone knowing what’s in there. Elvie trainer comes with an optional cover for the tighter fit and more personalized experience and an iOS-only companion app to guide the user through a five-minute workout within a chosen program and strength rating. The device tailors itself to the user’s unique needs and muscle tone, improving the exercise difficulty with the woman’s progress. The app also allows tracking progress, encouraging women to keep the consistent training schedule for best results as soon as in 4 weeks or less.
The era of smart female health is here
As of 2018, we are happy to observe the variety of femtech solutions that are already up and running, ready to empower women to take control of their health across many life facets. The devices we reviewed aren’t pushing a woman to make certain life choices that can be expected from her by society. No, these are simply tools to destigmatize natural body processes for the female body and facilitate making family planning decisions.
We want to see more such devices next year. What about you? Please tell us in comments your opinion on femtech devices you’d welcome in your life.
Inga Shugalo is a Healthcare Industry Analyst at Itransition, a custom software development company headquartered in Denver, Colorado. She focuses on Healthcare IT, highlighting the industry challenges and technology solutions that tackle them. Inga’s articles explore diagnostic potential of healthcare IoT, opportunities of precision medicine, robotics and VR in healthcare and more.
