Maternal and reproductive health innovation ecosystems—which have emerged as a small but potentially impactful space within broader health innovation ecosystems—could expand women’s and girl’s options for managing their sexual, reproductive, and maternal health. If such technologies are widely accessible and adopted, they could help the United States combat its maternal and reproductive health crises while also addressing global health disparities for women.
Historically and contemporarily, the needs of women have gone neglected within health research and clinical trials. Many persistent health issues that inherently only affect women (maternal health, menstrual health, pelvic and sexual health, fertility, menopause, and contraception) or disproportionately affect women (osteoporosis or cardiovascular disease) have inadequate treatments or treatments not sufficiently tailored for women. Failures to detect and diagnose conditions like endometriosis worsen women’s health.
Women’s unmet health needs have created opportunities for for-profit and nonprofit organizations to create innovative, digital solutions that address chronic illness as well as reproductive and maternal health. These solutions are known as femtech or “largely tech-enabled, consumer-centric solutions addressing women’s health.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, the term was coined by Ida Tin, who cofounded a menstrual cycle tracking company that now has millions of users. Tin’s goal in coining the term and creating digital health solutions that address the unique needs and challenges of women was to overcome conventionally “taboo” topics around women’s health and wellbeing as part of a larger effort to spark a seismic change in women’s health.
Women’s unmet health needs have created opportunities for for-profit and nonprofit organizations to create innovative, digital solutions.
According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the amount of research, startups, and funding dedicated to femtech has significantly increased since 2010. Investment now exceeds $500 million, which is still only around 3 percent of all digital health funding in the private sector. Due to inequities in the tech sector, femtech’s mostly female founders face challenges securing the funding needed to drive their innovations forward. But it’s clear the commercial market for this particular tech space is poised for growth.
The social sector is also betting big on femtech, especially innovations that double as global health solutions. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, “has committed $280 million per year from 2021 to 2030 to develop and improve contraceptive technologies, support family planning that reflect the preferences of local communities, and ensure women and girls are in control of their own reproductive health.”
In line with its Universal Access Project (UAP), the United Nations Foundation is also looking to make investments in technology that addresses the obstacles women face. Accordingly, they have “issued a call for global and national companies to make new, tangible, and timebound commitments to enhance women’s health, wellbeing, and gender equity in the workplace and throughout global supply chains.” As Dilly Severin, executive director of the UAP, has pointed out, this work is intricately tied to other important work at the UN: “As we work to advance the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, this is a significant moment to recognize that women in particular face systemic health disparities that are increasingly exacerbated by climate change and other global crises.”
Femtech is valuable within and beyond the United States because these technologies not only address critical gaps in the health solutions available to women but also increase women’s agency and social and economic power. As Melinda French Gates, one of the biggest philanthropic supporters of femtech stated, “Contraceptives are one of the most powerful tools we have. It puts the power in the hands of young girls and women to plan their families, and quite honestly to plan their futures.”
Likewise, the other domains of femtech—such as fertility health, gynecological health, menopause management, advanced maternal care, and enhanced treatments for chronic diseases that affect women—can be used as tools of empowerment for women and girls.
Areas of Promise
These technologies not only address critical gaps in the health solutions available to women but also increase women’s agency and social and economic power.
Many advanced technological tools show tremendous potential for helping women live full and productive lives without having to worry about their menstrual health. For example, Danielle Nicklas created NovvaCup—“a sustainable solution to tackle challenges women encounter in menstrual care, especially in the wilderness, or areas with limited facilities”—when she herself experienced difficulty finding menstrual health products while traveling. NovvaCup uses medicine and biomedical engineering to help women and girls achieve greater freedom and independence in their day-to-day lives.
To help combat the maternal health crisis and improve health outcomes for mothers, birthing people, and their infants, a number of new technologies help better monitor the health and progress of pregnancies, address high-risk scenarios, and create better care solutions.
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At Johns Hopkins, biomedical engineering student Selena Shirkin has conducted research and testing on emergency in-utero surgery, a high-risk procedure that is performed on approximately 120,000 babies in the United States every year. Membrane rupture occurs in nearly a third of these extremely delicate surgeries. According to Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, “Shirkin led a team to design a safer solution, focusing on preventing membrane rupture. Their research revealed that the main cause of rupture is the use of inappropriate surgical devices. To help address this, and in collaboration with experts, they developed a novel port system designed for fetal therapy, which is currently in the prototype stage.”
According to Femtech Insider, Clarius Mobile Health has received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Clarius OB AI, a “fetal biometric measurement tool” that could widen access to obstetrical prenatal monitoring and care. “The Clarius OB AI model stands out due to its state-of-the-art deep learning models, developed using over 30,000 de-identified fetal ultrasound images. This technology provides consistent and precise measurements, empowering new ultrasound users such as midwives and nurses to perform accurate fetal ultrasound measurements with ease and confidence.”
While some femtech is promising, the technologies to emerge out of this space could also put women at risk. Since the innovations themselves are imperfect and because they will be deployed within a biased society, they also pose a potential threat to women’s health and safety.
By making sure femtech is trustworthy, private and safe, we move one step closer to promoting health and wellness among half of the world’s population.
Trustworthiness, Privacy, and Safety
People tend to overhype or inflate the capabilities of emerging technologies while minimizing the risks, so it is always important to critically consider the potential harms and risks associated with innovative solutions. Femtech solutions, like all other innovations, should be subject to rigorous testing and evaluation before they are widely adopted.
It is especially crucial to ensure that femtech solutions are trustworthy, meaning that they work as they are intended to work and are consistent. Sensors and other devices that monitor maternal and fetal health, for instance, can only be helpful if the system is reliable. False positives can harm the user and waste important medical resources. On the other hand, false negatives can mask devastating health outcomes.
Femtech has also raised significant privacy concerns, especially within the United States, where abortion care is restricted, and miscarriages may be subject to scrutiny. According to the article “The Future is Femtech: Privacy and Data Security Issues Surrounding Femtech Applications,” because femtech often relies on women’s personal health information (PHI), “a question of law exists as to whether the personal health information collected, stored and used by Femtech applications, should fall under the definition of PHI and…be subject to federal regulation and oversight.”
Accordingly, privacy and data security policies need to be amended to better protect PHI transmitted through femtech solutions. While the HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Health Care attempts to offer some legal protections for women living in states that have severe restrictions on reproductive and maternal healthcare, this information could also be vulnerable to data breaches and other security concerns. It is also unclear when, how, and under what circumstances the information from these devices should be shared with medical professionals who can intervene on a patient’s behalf.
When these technologies utilize artificial intelligence (AI), it is also important to ensure the systems are trained on representative data that doesn’t reflect unjust societal dynamics that could exacerbate rather than alleviate health disparities.
By making sure femtech is trustworthy, private, and safe, we move one step closer to promoting health and wellness among half of the world’s population. According to a report from the McKinsey Health Institute and World Economic Forum, that step carries a possible economic gain of $1 trillion. More importantly, femtech could save lives, reduce the amount of time women are sick or dealing with incapacitating pain, and increase their general wellbeing.
Femtech presents an opportunity to use technology to promote gender equality, but that will only happen if public and private investments pay off in technologies women and girls can trust with the most intimate aspects of their lives.
