The Body Series: How Technology Is Transforming Women’s Healthcare

“Femtech” has and continues to serve the purpose of creating a catchy reference to a business sector that primarily addresses the health and wellness needs of women -and people who experience similar health issues- through software, diagnostics, products and tech-enabled health services.

Companies like Pexxi are doing just this: starting from scratch by building a dataset with hundreds of datapoints on an individual woman and using this to recommend the right contraceptive for her unique profile. Wild.ai is also collecting data on individual women and is building an algorithm for personalised fitness recommendations that operate in... See more

Unsurprisingly though, sexual well-being and reproductive health are not the only issues women face in their day-to-day lives. Take driving for example: Although, in general, females are considered safer drivers, women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured during a car crash. Some say this is simply due to the female body being more “fragile”... See more

The first wave was pivotal in starting and encouraging the conversation around women’s health and normalising the use of digital health tools. Startups in this formative era predominantly targeted a younger, digitally-native customer, and so the next natural progression for the market was to start solving for issues experienced by older women.

These technological offerings can address unmet health-care needs by circumventing traditional intermediaries, such as payers (eg, insurance companies and governments), clinicians, employers, and the pharmaceutical industry, and provide patients with direct access to health-related data and services. Like other industries that empower consumers wit... See more