The femtech sector, which is expected to be worth $60 billion by 2027, includes the newest inventions like as apps that track hormones and a device that prevents hot flushes.
Louise Stevenson, a lifelong worrier, questioned her husband if her anxiety was harmful, and his response made her pause. “He claimed that it had a detrimental effect on everything,” It gave her the push she needed to ask for assistance.
She looked for tech-based methods to supplement her therapy after receiving a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. Yet, she adds, “I couldn’t locate an app that gave what I wanted. I was writing down my problems on the backs of envelopes, literally. In order to enter the booming femtech sector, the 41-year-old Herefordshire mother quit her career in financial services, founded Worry Tree, one of 15 approved mental health apps in the NHS app library.
Although anybody can use the app, which encourages users to recognize and confront their anxieties, 75% of her users are female. It finds found that their likelihood of experiencing anxiety is twice that of men’s. Stevenson has now been accepted to the London-based Femtech Lab, a brand-new dedicated accelerator that is being hailed as the first in Europe to concentrate on this industry.
According to Pauliina Martikainen, investment director at the venture capitalists Maki.vc, “we’ve just scratched the surface” when it comes to femtech products, which refer to goods that solve health or welfare issues specific to women. For instance, she notes that by 2030, 1.2 billion women would be menopausal or postmenopausal worldwide, and that nearly no one is satisfied with the care that is now being provided.
What then is brand-new or approaching?
The use of technology to improve the lives of people is becoming more and more common.
According to Martikainen, businesses who are successful in creating feedback loops have access to significant data that can be used for research as well as the development and validation of ew treatments.
Femtech’s initial emphasis on periods and fertility has changed since then. Nowadays, it includes everything from individualized fitness programs and hormonal awareness to sexual empowerment to racy “sex tech” like vibrating devices made by women who are aware of their own physiology and apps that offer guidance on sex therapy based on science. By 2027 the market worldwide is anticipated to be worth $60bn, and is expected to expand 16% year-on-year.
Fertility, menopause, and hormone health (monitoring hormones and what that means for how you exercise and what you eat) are some of the fastest-growing sectors in this market, according to Karina Vazirova and fellow femtech evangelist Katia Lang, the team behind Femtech Lab. Women make up more over half of the population, yet Vazirova claims that we still have unfulfilled demands. Several items aren’t made for women, and men are often favored in clinical studies.
Nevertheless there are dangers. Femtech, a phrase that many people despise, collects extremely private data about women’s bodies, habits, sex lives, pregnancies, and parenting concerns. The quantity of data is “unimaginable,” according to Jo O’Reilly, deputy editor at ProPrivacy, a group that promotes online privacy.
According to internet lore, Google is aware of your pregnancy before you are. Just last January, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Flo, one of the most well-known fertility and period tracking apps, on claims that it had shared users’ health information with Facebook and Google, among others. According to O’Reilly, apps that monitor private health information are “a privacy gamble”. And the free ones in particular, this is true.
Helene Guillaume, the founder of the startup Wild.AI, which analyzes data on female athletes ranging from sleep and vital signs to how they are feeling, claims that the company is adamantly committed to protecting the privacy of its customers. We were created after the GDPR, and data privacy is ingrained in who we are. Ultimately, consumers get to decide how private they want to be.
