Femtech-Savvy

Sometime back a Reddit user started a thread in a women’s forum asking members for the best period tracking app. Answers were varied but also an indication of just how this technology had become important to women’s lives. One responder had Polycystic Ovarian Disease and had been us­ing an app for two years. She wrote that it allowed users “to track various aspects of their menstrual cycle, including symptoms, mood, and sexual activity. This information can be helpful in identifying patterns and track­ing changes in menstrual health. It even creates reports that you can pres­ent to your gynaecologist. It makes my life a whole lot easier.” Another woman said, “I even conceived/tracked my ovulation days through this app and it was quite accurate for me.”

In February 2023, the Indian Journal of Marketing published a study on the usage of these apps in India. It was based on a nationwide survey of 464 women. Titled ‘Menstrual Tracking Apps in India : User Perceptions, Attitudes, and Implications’, the paper stated, “The study found that women indeed found menstrual tracking apps convenient and highly educational. Almost all women agreed that they didn’t find menstrual tracking apps embarrassing and weren’t ashamed to open the app in front of others.” Referencing another Indian study that had earlier found one-third of young women even in urban India did not think they had correct knowledge about menstruation, it added, “But the rise of digital health platforms seems to have been able to bridge that gap.”

One of the most popular menstrual tracking apps in the world is Clue. It was founded in 2012 by Ida Tin, a Danish entrepreneur. In 2016, she also coined the word—FemTech—that would come to describe not just Clue but the set of such technologies that empower and make the lives of women better. In 2022, the global consulting firm McKinsey came out with a study on the FemTech phenomenon which expounded on its scale. They looked at 763 companies and gave an overview of what went under the umbrella of this term: “FemTech provides a wide range of solutions to improve healthcare for women across a number of female-specific con­ditions, including maternal health, menstrual health, pelvic and sexual health, fertility, menopause, and contraception, as well as a number of gen­eral health conditions that affect women disproportionately or differently (such as osteoporosis or cardiovascular disease). While it’s still early days, our research indicates that the dynamics underlying FemTech are acceler­ating: public awareness, company formation, and funding are surging.”

An area where apps are being leaned into is by those who want to get pregnant. For example, Ovia app uses a “fertility algorithm to help users track their cycle and identify their most fertile days”. The app then presents a fertility forecast by way of a score between 1 to 10 with the latter being the day when the probability of conceiving is greatest. A large number of such apps provide the same service. It is not an exact science and even though there have been reports of inaccuracy, the segment is growing. Another area where technology is assisting women is after they become pregnant. A research paper in ‘BMC Pregnancy Childbirth’ stated that studies in Australia, China and Ireland have found that more than 50 per cent of all pregnant women used such apps. It added, “This demand is matched by severe supply: The number of pregnancy apps surpasses the market for all other medical topics, with the most popular apps featuring over 10 million installations and 1.5 million user reviews. Pregnancy apps offer a wide range of features and functionalities. Some focus on individual pregnancy aspects (such as the search for a baby name), while others offer encompassing bundles, aiming to cover all potential pregnancy facets.”

The number of issues being addressed through technol­ogy is burgeoning. Arogya Sakhi, for instance, is an app launched at the beginning of this year by The Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India. It is free and aims to bring medical information to women across all age groups. Another app, Gytree, has a subscriber model. For an annual fee, the app pitches itself as a “one stop platform for women’s health”. Those who sign up, get consultations with health professionals and monitoring of their general health as well as ailments. Pee Safe, meanwhile, focuses on personal hygiene of women. The com­pany’s first product was a toi­let seat sanitiser which could be used in public restrooms to prevent urinary tract infec­tion. Since then, it claims to have more than 50 products “available across 110 cities in India, across 18 countries and in over 15000 stores”.

When Ida Tin founded Clue and was scouting for investors, an issue she faced was that men couldn’t relate to businesses that targeted women, and men made up a majority of the investors’ com­munity. She would often be the only woman in the room while making the pitch and it would get uncomfortable for her listeners. A New Yorker pro­file on her said, “Many potential investors balked at the no­tion of software with inputs for levels of menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness, and sex drive, or the capacity to digitally share windows of ovulation with a partner. Time and again, Tin told me, the men sitting across from her in pitch meet­ings said, ‘I only invest in products I can use myself.’ The idea embarrassed even some who saw its business potential; one venture capitalist who eventually made a small investment insisted that his involvement be kept private.” A decade later the circumstances are very different. FemTech India, a net­working and promotion platform, claims to have more than 120 companies partnering with them. It recently partnered with Flo, one of the world’s biggest brands in the segment, for a marketing campaign. As part of it, autorickshaws car­ried advertisements about period tracking, signalling how mainstream the messaging has become even in India.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the natural next step in tech­nology meeting women’s needs. Google, for instance, has a programme to target maternal health. It does this in partner­ship with an NGO called ARMANN which uses technology and government infrastructure to make pregnant women and new mothers aware about maintaining good health. A Harvard University paper on it writes, “Unfortunately, a key challenge in such information delivery programs is that a significant fraction of beneficiaries drop out of the program. Yet, non-profits often have limited health-worker resources (time) to place crucial service calls for live interaction with beneficiaries to prevent such engagement drops. The goal of this project is to design ways in which AI can be leveraged to better predict beneficiaries who are at a higher risk of drop­ping out and then planning the limited resources optimally to maximize beneficiary engagement with the program.”

On the commercial side, AI is being used by a slew of ser­vices focusing on women and also creating markets in the process. There are AI-based medical diagnostics that claim to find breast cancer much before than it is normally diag­nosed. Another area is screening for cervical cancer. Pune-based Periwinkle Technologies has an instrument made up of a scope that takes images and an elec­tronic tablet. They claim that AI can, in seven minutes, come up with a “risk level assessment of captured images to generate a colour coded report immediate­ly”. Myri Health has an app with AI-powered features “designed to provide personalized, around-the-clock care for mothers, from pregnancy through postpartum recovery.”

The claim of using AI can often be a marketing spiel but given the march of the technology, it will impose itself in a greater measure with time. Another issue with FemTech that has come to the fore is privacy. Last year, researchers at King’s College London and University College London took 20 popular apps and analysed their policies for privacy and data safety. According to them, the study revealed “that in many instances, user data could be subject to access from law enforcement or security authorities. Only one app that the researchers reviewed explicitly addressed the sensitiv­ity of menstrual data with regard to law enforcement in their privacy policies and made efforts to safeguard users against legal threats.”

The overhang of such issues notwithstanding, FemTech is going to loom large in women’s lives simply because it is going to become easier to access and more tools are going to be added to the arsenal. Wearables today, for example, can capture an enormous amount of information about human bodies. Add to that profiles based on genetics and there will be health solutions tailored specifically to individuals. And it all means the mushrooming of more businesses and services.

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